Ed Wightman, who is directing Arms and the Man as his fourth production for Canberra Repertory Society, says the play might have premiered in 1894, but it still has plenty to say to an audience in 2018. Its themes — cynicism versus idealism, the grim reality of war — remain all too relevant today.

George Bernard Shaw wanted to write a play satirising war. His aim was to situate it during a reasonably contemporary conflict but not so close to home it would make his British audience too uncomfortable to receive the message he wanted to convey. So he set Arms and the Man during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of the 1880s.

"It was Shaw's first big commercial success," Wightman says.

Arms and the Man is set in the home of the nouveau-riche Bulgarian Saranoff family. Sergius (played by Riley Bell) is off fighting and his fiancee Raina Petkoff (Lexi Sekuless) is confronted by the gun-wielding Bluntschli (Joel Hutchings), a soldier fighting for the Serbian side who has fled after a defeat in battle by the Bulgarians. But she's not so much frightened as intrigued.

"She harbours him in her bedroom," Wightman says. He hides him when Bulgarian soldiers come searching for him so he won't be killed.

They talk, and she's surprised to learn he carries chocolates rather than pistol cartridges in his ammunition pouches. It's indicative of his cynical and pragmatic attitude towards war and life, which shocks the idealistic Raina. But she and her mother Catherine (Antonia Kitzel) sneak him out of the house when the coast is clear, disguised in an old coat belonging to Raina's father, Major Petkoff (Brian Kavanagh).

After the war is over, Sergius and Major Petkoff return, and so does Bluntschli, ostensibly to return the coat, but he really wants to see Raina again.

"I've always been fascinated by Shaw — he was that rare thing, a writer who was a celebrity but also a serious thinker. I've always wanted to direct one of his plays — he was one of the most talented playwrights in the English language."

Wightman says Shaw wrote about the issues of his time — poverty, racism, feminism, class, war — but handled the material with great wit and was ahead of his time when it came to writing strong roles for women.

"I don't think he has the reputation he deserves in terms of modern audiences."

Wightman says he will be putting "a contemporary lens" on Arms and the Man so it won't be seen as a museum piece. He'll be using an abstract set and modern music — "an Eastern European trio will do spins on traditional and folk music" — and he says that the costumes will create a sense of wealth and be inspired by the original period rather than directly of it, without being deliberately anachronistic.

One of the key goals, he says, is "making sure there is psychological realism so the play has some depth to it". He doesn't want Shaw's work coming off like a sitcom. There's enough seriousness in the work, he says, to help with this, with the characters feeling frustrated and repressed at being trapped in circumstances beyond their control, especially Raina.

"In the context of the current experience of female culture that takes on even more resonance in terms of today's audience in the light of the #metoo movement and #timesup," Wightman says.

There's also modern-day relevance in the examination of class ("We like to think of ourselves as a classless society," Wightman says, though he's not so sure that's the case in reality) and in its satirising of the romanticism of the glorification of battles and warfare.

For Hutchings, playing Bluntschli has given him his first role in a play rather than a musical since he finished drama school in 2009 (he was most recently seen in Canberra as the lead in Strictly Ballroom). He's enjoyed the opportunity to get stuck into words and text and character in a way most musicals don't offer, and to get an idea of what the show will look like at a much earlier stage than a musical allows.

He says Shaw's characters are very strong, complex and well-rounded.

"It has held up very well," he says of Arms and the Man. "The comedy has held up very well."