The Encounter

With just one man on a stage cluttered with mics and speakers, The Encounter is a compelling innovation of sound and storytelling which makes excellent Festival programming.

This is compelling theatre produced by the famed British company Complicite and directed Simon McBurney.   

With each in the audience wired up with headphones, The Encounter’s only real production value is sound – and a few cross lights from Paul Anderson.

For two hours – with tangents - performer Richard Katz takes us on the astonishing journey of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre into the depths of the Amazon jungle.  Soon stripped of his camera and his clothes, McIntyre hurtles through a raw hallucinogenic tale into the natural world. 

All this, his kidnapping by elusive tribes, his discovery of the very source of the Amazon – and of life itself – and his remarkable return, was told to the Romanian writer Petru Popescu.

Katz hosts this epic with his amiable London accent, with McIntyre’s American drawl or creating all the sounds of the jungle and its natives as he circles a huge 3D mic.

This renders magically in our headphones as an intimate 360 degree circle of localised sounds.

The cacophony deepens still when Katz adds other sound objects or small recorders which are then looped into repetitions.  A bank of boys at the back of the theatre keep all this in motion, adding music to Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin’s sound design, and keeping an eye on the autocue.

But for all the bristling technology, at heart this is the ancient allure of shared and mighty storytelling.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton.