Photo by Joan Marcus

Part mad scientist, part creative genius, Simon McBurney is the co-founder and artistic director of Complicite - a company which strives to introduce audiences to completely original and innovative ways of experiencing theatre. This particular production, inspired by Petru Popescu's book "Amazon Beaming," premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2015 and has since enjoyed acclaimed engagements at London's Barbican, as well as all over Europe. Kudos to the producers - no less than eleven of them altogether - who were brave enough to mount this daring piece on the commercial stage of the Great White Way, enabling New York audiences to encounter McBurney's brilliance for themselves.

At the beginning of the show, McBurney acts as our guide and instructor to some of the technological marvels which accompany him on stage. He earns our trust, reaching out his hand, so we drop our guards and go with him on this bold journey. Each audience member is kitted out with a special pair of headphones and we become quickly accustomed to the 3D audio world of the production, with sounds, voices and music travelling from left to right and engulfing us in his imaginative realm. We also audibly meet his (then) 5 year old daughter and get glimpses into our host's home-life and we meet his alter ego for the evening - Loren McIntyre - through the manipulation of McBurney's voice. A second microphone transposes his natural, higher-pitched British accent to a deeper, American one. The National Geographic photographer is our protagonist for the production, as he documents and "relives" an epic journey from 1969, in which he becomes lost and stranded in the remote Javari Valley in the Amazon rainforest. His encounter with the Mayoruna tribe there resembles something straight off the pages of Hollywood fiction, but it is fact and the perils McIntyre faced are profoundly real.

The sounds of the jungle, its leaves and branches, insects, frogs and beasts are astonishingly brought to life through the binaural technology and Paul Anderson's subtle lighting design. The production elements are marvellously coupled with McBurney's performance, switching effortlessly between himself as Narrator and McIntrye, our protagonist. Pacing the stage like a caged beast and maniacally depicting a mental breakdown or hallucinogenic revelations, he becomes quite the menacing and intimidating figure, especially from where I was sat on the third row. Tempted to close my eyes at times and fully immerse myself in this audibly stimulated world, if truth be told, I just couldn't keep my eyes off our host.

Click here for tickets to The Encounter, which is booking through to January 8th, 2017 at Broadway's John Golden Theatre.

- by Tom Millward