Nothing To Hold On To

Ryan Corr and I meet for the first time over coffee. At this point we're still strangers, and while it would be highly unprofessional to suggest the possibility of sex if you squint just enough, the scene could resemble some now old-fashioned ceremony of courting, sizing one another up over coffee, talking face to face.

Though, in a world where we're all plugged in and online such interactions – especially when arising from slightly less professional circumstances – have become almost archaic. You can meet whomever you want, whenever you want on the Internet, and anyone that's logged onto a social networking site will know from the ads that there's a myriad of companies offering to help you do so. Ethan Strange, the character Corr will play in the upcoming Jocelyn Moorhouse-directed production of Laura Eason's Sex With Strangers, doesn't just know this world, he owns it, and has made a living from it with a tell-all blog-turned New York Times best seller that reveals his conquests.

Having made a name for himself as an actor on screen – most notably in Packed To The Rafters – Corr, the 2011 recipient of the Heath Ledger Scholarship, is revelling in the opportunity to spend weeks building a role for the stage, and picking apart Eason's hyper-contemporary script. “The thing that appealed to me most about it is it's so fucking current,” says Corr, “Like, I'd just spent three years in drama school painting on moustaches and playing forty-year-old Jacobeans, or Shakespeares, and here's a guy that's around my age that's dealing with how the Internet is affecting relationships, you know; this play just seemed to be so relevant to my life.”

A meeting of sexes, generations and writing styles, the two-hander sees Corr opposite Jacqueline McKenzie as Olivia, a thirty-something author (in the more traditional sense than Ethan) struggling to match the success of her first novel and, in the midst of crisis, primed for the chaos – professional, emotional, physical – that her interaction with flavour of the month Ethan will inevitably bring.

“It asks questions; what is literature? What is literature turning into? It talks about the blogosphere, and how lots of different multimedia mediums are affecting what we call friends now, or what we call writing, or what we call dating,” says Corr, whose quick to point out that, while the youngest in the creative team, his own feelings towards the technological world differ strongly from those of Ethan.

“I had to explain to Joss and Jac what Twitter was,” laughs Corr, “And that's what I mean by current. There's a scene in the play where I give her an iPad and say 'You can put all your favourite books on it,' and she says, 'Yeah, but there's something I like about holding a physical book.' It speaks about the loss of things like vinyl and CDs, and soon we'll all have nothing to hold on to, we'll just be plugged into databases. I find the concept really interesting – I'm terrified of Facebook! What's really appealing about this play is that it has that wide cross-generational scope to it.”