What could have been a gripping dramatic narrating of National Geographic photographer, Loren McIntyre’s amazing physical and mental journey into the heart of the Amazonian forest in search of a lost tribe has been transformed into our personal adventure.

Simon McBurney, co-founder of possibly Britain’s most innovative theatre company, Complicite, alone on the huge stage of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, takes the earphoned audience into a polyphonic world which becomes rapidly as disorientating as McIntyre’s.

Based on Petru Popescu’s account of McIntyre’s experiences in the book, Amazon Beaming and McBurney’s own recent journey to meet the Mayoruna cat people, Encounter explores the paper thin vulnerability of our cultural certainties anchored as they are to a sequential faith in time unknown to these people of the forest. To them time is, or perhaps was, now that our outside world values have reached them, an “invisible companion” where concepts such as past and future are unreal.

When McIntyre loses his watch and camera, his last hold on his understanding of reality begins to dissolve. With no shared spoken language he finds the Mayoruna chief is able to communicate messages mind to mind as he finds himself joining their journey back to the “Beginning,” to a kind of protective rebirth or death.

Encounter is a magnificent theatrical melding of McBurney’s superb performance with technology that exerts some of the hallucinatory powerMcIntyre experienced while never dominating the compelling dramatic experience.

But this is theatre, once removed from everyday reality, and Complicite has never fallen into the naturalistic trap. McBurney reminds us throughout that he is telling a story, He is after all “working” as his young daughter’s voiced interruptions demanding his attention humorously remind us.

Encounter is a theatrical tour de force – what the Festival should be about.

Until August 23. Box office (0131) 473-2000.

Review by Gordon Parsons