Theatre / amazon
Review: The Encounter, Bristol Old Vic
On so many levels, Complicité’s extraordinary show is about bewilderment, oblivion, exposure to things you can’t quite process. It tells the true story of how, in 1969, American photographer Loren McIntyre was dropped into the middle of the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles up the mighty river, in order to seek out and document one of the few remaining indigenous tribes, the Mayoruna.
From the moment when he spied three Mayoruna tribe members watching him warily through the trees and followed them deep into the jungle, too excited to think of memorising his way back to the river and to civilisation, McIntyre’s adventure was one of increasing strangeness and bewilderment, and of exposure to ways of life completely different to his own.
And that sense of strangeness, wonder and unease – more, of total surrender to other ways of experiencing life and parcelling up reality – is exactly what performer Simon McBurney manages to evoke in this astonishingly immersive and evocative piece of theatre.
Using a mix of state-of-the-art sound and visual technology, and those more timeless skills of totally committed acting and storytelling, McBurney creates for audiences a world every bit as strange, haunting and overpowering as that deep jungle world – with its rituals, superstitions, kinship with nature, different view of time even – must have been for McIntyre.
A gripping, evocative and, for its duration, a truly mind-altering theatrical experience. Catch it if you can.
The Encounter was at Bristol Old Vic from Friday, September 18 to Sunday, September 20 and continues to Warwick, London and Manchester. For more details, visit www.complicite.org/productions/TheEncounter
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