That's the opening line of Ranters Theatre's show Intimacy, taken from a real-life conversation between strangers.

Intimacy is based on the premise that it can sometimes be easier to reveal ourselves to strangers than to people we know. And it was inspired by something that really happened.

The company's artistic director, Adriano Cortese, was bored one night about 10 o'clock in Melbourne in his St Kilda apartment above a restaurant in 2009.

"I was with a friend," Cortese recalls, "and we thought, 'Why don't we go we down to the street and ask people walking past if they want to come up to the apartment for an impromptu party."

They saw a man playing an accordion and gave him $20 to go up and play music and, standing just outside the apartment, invited people passing by to come up - people walking alone, couples, a group of three young women.

"We thought no one would come," Cortese says, and there were certainly refusals, among the 50 or so pedestrians they approached. but within 20 minutes, they had about 15 people in the apartment, none of whom they had met before and none of whom knew each other.

"Within 45 minutes people were being very personal, talking about themselves in a very personal way. I was struck by how quickly this occurred," Cortese says.

The fact that people were strangers might,he says, have made such candidness easier in some ways, paradoxical though it might seem: knowing they would probably never see each other again, the people could talk to each other more freely and openly, in some ways, than they could with people they knew well.

This experience inspired Intimacy, the first season of which played at the Melbourne Festival in 2010. Ranters Theatre has performed it every year since, taking it to international arts festivals including Culturgest (Portugal) , Nordozon (Netherlands), Festival Theatreformen (Germany), Push International Arts Festival (Vancouver) and Coil Festival (New York). This is the show's first regional Australian tour and the first time the company has been to Canberra.

In Intimacy, Cortese plays Paul Lum (a former company member who left four years ago), the one one constant in a series of conversations with various characters played by the two other actors - three by Beth Buchanan, two by Patrick Mofatt.

"When Paul left, we thought, 'Oh my God, what are we going to do?' It was easier for me to do it than to get someone else," Cortese says.

"The challenge for me was to get Paul out of my head," he says. Playing someone he knew, saying things he himself would not necessarily have said, was a particular acting challenge.

"Some of the things he says are very personal but when you commit to the thing you're aware of that - it's coming from Paul and the stuff he came up with was really great and there was no time to change."

The stories they tell were all taken from the cast members (though, interestingly, none came out of the house party that provided the initial inspiration for the show). It was created through ensemble work like all the Melbourne company's productions and won several awards including the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for theatre script and Green Room Awards for best ensemble and best new writing for Melbourne stage.

The idea. Cortese says, was not to create verbatim theatre but to create an intimate and humorous theatrical experience by mixing the personal stories with the cast's own embellishments. Video projections are also used to give another dimension to the characters and their stories.

"They're all taken from life but in improving them we've maybe gone beyond life. The kernel of the stories are taken from life, from our own experiences."

Buchanan says the spontaneity and emotion of the show have helped it resonate with audiences around the world and there seems to be a universal quality to its theme of forming connections with strangers. It's something she particularly notices when on tour.

"When you travel, in your state of mind you're absorbing the environment, you're really focused in yourself and I've really focused myself with people and exchanges."

It's a time she finds "difficult" and "raw", she says, and she often finds herself opening up candidly to strangers, people she will probably never see again ,but who can often be very generous with their time and willingness to listen and engage.

Buchanan says, "For me personally having one thing having baggage in my life makes me anxious and I find I can't sleep."

She had a period 18 years ago while in Spain when she was having problems that led to anxiety and sleep issues that inspired the creation of one of her characters in Intimacy suffering from insomnia.

"It became something else. I turned it into an experience of someone having it on an ongoing basis."

As for that opening question about the "most extreme thing ever done out of love for somebody" , the answer given was "make a film".

Intimacy is on at the Street Theatre, Childers Street, Canberra City West from August 23 to 26 at 7.30pm and on August 27 at 4pm. Tickets $30-$39. Bookings: 62471223 or thestreet.org.au.