Edinburgh Festival 2015 review – The Encounter: unnerving and astonishing

Simon McBurney's new work for Complicité is good old-fashioned storytelling, but one that uses astonishing new technology to construct an aural landscape inside our heads.

McBurney tells the tale of Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer sent to the Amazonian rainforest in 1969 to capture the elusive Mayoruna tribe. After glimpsing them in the dense jungle, he follows them before becoming hopelessly lost — and dependent on them to survive.

Gareth Fry’s soundscape and binaural technology — sounds sent separately into the left and right ear on headphones the audience wear throughout — create a deeply intimate experience, even in the cavernous EICC; at times it’s really unnerving. One moment McBurney is perfectly still, whispering into the microphone, animated the next as he becomes the fevered and frightened McIntyre. The technology produces a similar state of altered consciousness to McIntyre’s; we are in the undergrowth where jaguars lurk, while some of us swat imaginary mosquitoes buzzing in our ears.

At two hours without an interval it’s too long and at times the story is confusing, but this is a remarkable work — try to catch it when it comes to the Barbican in February.