I'd go into the jungle with him any time.
Simon McBurney, the actor/director and head honcho of the theater company Complicite, has been to the jungle and back. After having been given a copy of “Amazon Beaming,” Petru Popescu's 1991 account of National Geographic photo-journalist Loren McIntyre's 1969 trip into the heart of the Amazon, McBurney visited the jungle, as well, to interview some of the indigenous “cat people” known as the Mayoruna.
His research, combined with the Popescu and McIntyre narratives, provides the framework for The Encounter, his latest solo, now playing to sold-out audiences in its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival.
The two-hour-long show is not just a tour de force for McBurney but an unforgettably brilliant work of total theater.
Working on a long, narrow stage at the cavernous Edinburgh International Conference Center, aided by a vast array of technical effects—sound, lighting, music, video and Foley projections—McBurney brings the Amazon to life for the binaural-earphone-wearing audience. A rain dance, a jaguar hunt, the buzz of mosquitoes are conjured up magically, as in a radio drama. But unlike radio, McBurney also acts out his role physically, one minute hacking his way through vines and undergrowth, another taking part in village rituals and tribal battles, then suffering through drug-induced hallucinations.
At stake is the survival of the Mayoruna, who keep fleeing the intrusion of the white man, the “developers” of the Amazon who bring nothing but exploitation, drunkenness and disease with them. Today the Mayoruna have retreated to the Brazilian/Peruvian border, still wary of the white man but savvy enough to have learned from him: they now write poetry, direct films, and use iPhones.
Their rituals, their perpetual quest for enlightenment, their questioning of the unknown and the meaning of life, imbue McBurney's monologue with a mystical essence, a philosophical dimension that lifts it high above the mundane.
As one reviewer said, “One leaves the theatre awestruck, moved and humbled, not by the fabulous technical accomplishments of the work but, much more profoundly, how McBurney and Complicite have used them to consume us within a story of an ancient people for whom the arrival of “modern” humanity spells destruction.”
As one of the Mayoruna said to McBurney, “You tell the world that we have survived. Many have perished. We have survived. But whether we will all survive...that is another matter.”
