The Encounter, theatre review: Unmissable Amazonian trip

The Encounter is a hypnotic, almost religious experience, says Henry Hitchings
A performance of startling inventiveness and precision: Simon McBurney
Henry Hitchings17 February 2016

Loren McIntyre, who died in 2003, was an American photojournalist irresistibly drawn to the Amazon. His travels brought him into contact with the Mayoruna, a people isolated from the rest of the world, and the story of his unsettling time in their midst is told in Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming. This is the inspiration for an astonishing piece by Simon McBurney’s visionary company Complicite, which uses sound to create an intricate sense of place and drama.

After wrong-footing us with some genial chat, during which we get used to the idea that we’re going to spend two hours wearing headphones, McBurney takes us into the depths of the jungle, evoking the textures of McIntyre’s adventure. It’s a performance of startling inventiveness and precision, simultaneously conspiratorial and confrontational. His persuasive storytelling is dense with detail — about, say, toads that can induce hallucinations when licked — and the mood is reminiscent of Apocalypse Now.

But what looks like a one-man show in fact relies on the invisible efforts of a brilliant technical crew. Inevitably it’s the richly layered sound design by Gareth Fry that impresses most. The centrepiece of the production is a head-shaped binaural microphone that achieves the sensation of three-dimensional sound — a voice whispering behind your shoulder, mosquitoes attacking from every angle, a river sloshing all around you.

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1/50

The result is that, as McIntyre gets lost, we also lose ourselves completely — in the Amazon, in the rituals of the Mayoruna, in our imagination. Distorting our view of time and space, The Encounter is a hypnotic, almost religious experience that warrants those two much-abused terms, “immersive” and “unmissable”.

Until March 6, Barbican Theatre (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk)

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