Simon McBurney has always been an explorer, with the writer, actor and director's work with Complicite, the theatre company he co-founded in 1983 as Theatre de Complicite, pioneers in introducing visual-based European-influenced and playfully off-kilter work to British audiences. When twenty years ago McBurney was given a copy of Amazon Beaming, Romanian writer and film director Petru Popescu's 1991 account of National Geographic photo-journalist Loren McIntyre's 1969 trip to the Javari Valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, its account of McIntyre's three months with a rarely sighted Mayoruna tribe and his quest for the source of the Amazon opened McBurney up to an adventure of his own. The result is The Encounter, a solo tour de force by McBurney, which marks Complicitie's début at Edinburgh International Festival, and which finds the audience being taken on a journey of their own to discover an ever-shifting world of sound that charts the profound extr
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.