Canberra composer Sally Greenaway calls her first theatre piece "an infomercial musical – the actor doesn't really sing". Created as the result of a Merlyn Myer Fund Composing Women's Commission and first presented in Melbourne, 7 Great Inventions of the Modern Industrial Age, was conceived and composed by Greenaway and scripted by Canberra writers Paul Bissett and Catherine Prosser. Shelly Higgs is directing the Canberra staging at The Street Theatre.

The commission gave Greenaway the freedom to create whatever she wanted and she was interested in producing a historical piece.

"There were lots of holes in my learning through my schooling," Greenaway says.

"I was always interested in how things work."

She spent 12 months researching what was to become 7 Great Inventions and took the resulting material to the writing team of Bisset and Prosser to help shape it into a narrative with a touch of steampunk.

Greenaway says: "We're bringing back to life the world's biggest history in the 20th century, bringing all these things back for people to rediscover and for a new generation of people to really learn how we got to where we are now."

Those inventions are: telecommunications; aviation and space exploration; convenience (everything from washing machines to lawn mowers); massed warfare ("I'm not trying to celebrate warfare but it is extremely significant"); the artificial brain and computing; biomechanical and medical marvels; and moving pictures (film and television).

In the original production the solo actor was a woman. In this version, Dene Kermond will play Harry Hawkins, a Victorian-era explorer and journalist who's travelling through time and space across the 20th century by zeppelin to gather material for an article in the magazine Modern Living called Gadzooks and Zoiks, What Will They Think of Next?

With incorporated sounds and film footage as well as Greenaway's score, the audience follows Harry on his journey as he discovers the innovations that brought major changes – both good and bad – to the world during the 20th century. From the first feature film – Australia's The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) – to the atomic bomb and the ATM, it's a voyage of discovery and a reminder of how much the human race has accomplished in a relatively short period of time.

Greenaway has taken one of Johann Sebastian Bach's Two and Three Part Inventions and turned it into a ragtime piece to set the scene.

"It's quite experimental for me – a lot of different genres and styles," says Greenaway of the score. Her previous work has ranged widely, from orchestral, film and concert works to jazz ensemble, big band, chamber and vocal music.

The score will be played, as in the previous season, by Melbourne new music group Syzygy Ensemble. The sextet will play a variety of instruments ranging from the conventional – including different-sized flutes and recorders and classical saxophone – to the unusual – such as air-raid sirens and test tubes filled with water.

Also on the stage will be more than 100 props, objects Greenaway has been collecting for the show including an early telephone, a gas mask, an early iron from the 1940s, an Arnott's biscuit tin and an old computer made from pieces of an ANU supercomputer from the mid-1990s.

"It was as big as an ACTION bus."

Bissett says he met Greenaway at a Resonants concert in 2015 and she told him about the project and said she was looking for a writer.

"I said, 'What a coincidence – I'm a writer'."

He and his partner Prosser signed on and devised the story to go around Greenaway's "great inventions" concept and research. They began writing in January 2016 and the first performance was at the Melbourne Recital Centre three months later. But this Canberra season will be a more elaborately staged affair.

Director Shelly Higgs says working on 7 Great Inventions of the Modern World has been a little different to the normal way of working on a show. Even though it's not a musical, the score is integral to the piece and the text and music are combined with each other and the various sonic and visual elements.

"I went through the music with Sally and why she chose to write it how she did and with Dene I went through the text Catherine and Paul wrote. It's a different way to work."

She says what most appeals to her about the show is its overall "levity" and its particular way of viewing the past – playful in some parts, more serious in others.