THEATRE
THE ENCOUNTER ★★★★★
Directed by Simon McBurney, performed by Richard Katz
Complicite, Malthouse Theatre,
Until February 10
An hallucinatory, tech-augmented tour de force, The Encounter is an extraordinary feat of theatrical storytelling unlike anything you will have experienced before.
![Richard Katz in <i>The Encounter</i>.](/web/20170203055107im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/v/d/l/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu4tk6.png/1486098094991.jpg)
The two-hour, one-man show takes us deep into the jungle: not simply the remote Amazon, where much of the action happens, but into the forest of human consciousness.
In this shadowy domain, fiction permeates and structures our sense of the real. Performer Richard Katz assays this subject on an unprepossessing sound stage. He talks of the link, familiar to theatregoers, between presence and empathy. "I could reach out and touch you if I liked," he says, "But I want to get even closer to you."
![Richard Katz whispers in your ear via a "binaural head".](/web/20170203055107im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/v/d/l/s/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gu4tk6.png/1486098094991.jpg)
And he does. Beckoning the audience to put on headphones, Katz circles a "binaural head" centre stage – a hi-tech gadget that records sound in 3D. Suddenly, he is pushing through to his seat in the row behind you (you turn to look, on reflex), or blowing in your ear (you can feel his breath, or think you can).
There are other startling, ingenious layers to the sound design: tricks that make it impossible to separate the recorded and the live, looping and sonic overlays that allow Katz to turn foley artist, creating the sounds of the Amazonian rainforest from everyday objects, and vocal manipulation which deepens his delivery into that of Loren McIntyre, the American photojournalist, and our protagonist.
The play is based on Amazon Beaming, Petru Popescu's fictionalised account of McIntyre's 1969 brush with death among the Mayoruna people, a largely uncontacted Indigenous tribe who believe they are descended from jaguars and pierce their cheeks with whiskers to prove it (hence their nickname, the Cat People).
We are drawn, as McIntyre was, into a breathless tale of survival and horror, natural majesty and imagined connection. Insects buzz around our ears, floods surge, the trees sing with animal life. The words, too, can be visceral, as when McIntyre's wounds are infested by the screw-worm fly, Cochliomyia Hominivorax, whose maggots bore into and devour living flesh.
This isn't a simple, first-person story, though. The Amazon can vanish into domestic meta-theatre through scenes of the artist at work at home in London, where he's interrupted by his curious young daughter. And swirling around in the ether are the voices of experts – in anthropology, philosophy, physics – who introduce knotty questions about our perception of time, the theory of mind, and the ethics of contacting Indigenous tribes.
Those who worry that technology might diminish the human part of the theatrical equation need not fear. Katz is compelled into a gruelling marathon of a performance – vocally immersive and ultimately physically demanding – as a climactic frenzy of destruction consumes the stage.
Even if you're not well-disposed to its glints of New Age thought, The Encounter is a thrilling ride. It feels like the theatre of the future and, in a profound way, opens your mind to expose just how hard-wired to imagine we all are.