The 1987 play The Popular Mechanicals is an Australian work - originally directed by Geoffrey Rush - that operates on a similar conceit to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It takes some of the minor characters from one of Shakespeare's best-known plays - in this case, the dramatic troupe from A Midsummer Night's Dream - and places them centre stage. Snippets of Shakespeare's original text are combined with new dialogue by Keith Robinson and Tony Taylor as well as the cast and director to create a new comedy.

In Shakespeare's original Dream the Popular Mechanicals put on a play within the play, Pyramus and Thisbe, but here the audience gets to see what the ragtag bunch got up to offstage before and after that happened - bumbling their way through rehearsals, arguing, singing, dancing, farting, playing with puppets, and generally carrying on and clowning around.

Director Sarah Giles was co-resident director at Sydney Theatre Company in 2013. In 2011 she won a Sydney Theatre Award for Best Direction of an Independent Production for The Ugly One at Griffin Theatre.

Of The Popular Mechanicals she says, "It's very funny and entertaining - it's about the theatre."

Noting that attention spans and styles of humour have changed somewhat in the 30 years since the premiere professional production, she says she and the cast have done a fair bit of reworking of the script and action.

"To us it was a springboard."

They've also reinvented the look of the show - the sets and costumes.

Giles says The Popular Mechanicals will appeal to people whether they love or hate William Shakespeare's plays.

"On the first leg of the tour we were in Mandurah in Western Australia and at one performance there sitting beside me was a father with his daughters aged six and three and on the other side was someone aged at least 90, or if not in their 80s.

"All five of us screamed with laughter the entire time. This is something for everyone."

The production was first presented at the State Theatre of South Australia in 2015 and then the Sydney Theatre Company did a season earlier this year. The Popular Mechanicals will be finishing its three-month tour in Canberra.

"This has been the third incarnation - there have been a couple of cast changes for the national tour," Giles says.

One cast member who's been with the production since the beginning is Charles Mayer. who plays two roles, both of them actors.

"Bottom is an amateur actor, a weaver who is working-class, down to earth and fancies himself a very good actor, which he turns out to be when they do Pyramus and Thisbe," he says.

However, when Bottom is turned into a donkey by the fairies - as happens in Dream - and is unable to rehearse the other Mechanicals are forced to find a replacement, Ralph Mowldie, also played by Mayer.

"He's a retired professional English actor - very posh, very arrogant, up himself and alcoholic - he drinks like a fish.

"I drink two goons of fake red wine during the show. It's very good hydration - it's water with red food colouring. I manage to hold it in for the show."

The British-born Mayer spent 11 years in the British army. In the latter part of his army career he had risen to the rank of captain and found he was spending too much time indoors and becoming bored.

He wanted a new challenge and decided to pursue acting, training at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He's acted in London on the West End, in Shanghai and in Australia on stage, film and television. Acting and the army have a lot in common, Mayer says: in both, a group of professionals undertakes a mission with a common purpose.

"Instead of an enemy, though, you have an audience who are on side."