Extended to 10pm on Monday 25 May due to popular demand!

We are delighted to be partnering with Complicité to broadcast The Encounter online. The show, described as ‘a tour de force’ by Financial Times and ‘one of the most fully-immersive theatre pieces ever created’ by New York Times played sold out runs at London’s Barbican theatre in 2016 and 2017 but on Friday 15 May at 7pm the show will be available online and you can watch it here for free.

The show has received a raft of five star reviews since its premiere in 2015 and is the winner of numerous awards including the 2017 Special Tony Award for Sound Design.

The Encounter tells the story of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre who, in 1969, became lost in a remote part of the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people. His encounter was to test his perception of the world, bringing the limits of human consciousness into startling focus.

Threading scenes of his own life with details of McIntyre’s journey, Simon McBurney incorporates objects and sound effects into this solo performance to evoke the depths of the Amazon rainforest. The show’s ground-breaking binaural sound design (3D audio) by Olivier Award winner, Gareth Fry, is transmitted to the audience through headphones and plugs into the power of the imagination, questioning our perceptions of time and our own consciousness.

“We are, as a consequence of this pandemic, bodily cut off from one another. Disconnected. Isolated. But perhaps this sense of our separation one from another, is simply a heightening of what we felt before this all began. We are thinking now, not only about how long this will last, but also what happens on the other side. To reconnect we need, perhaps, to learn to listen more closely. To each other. To our communities. To other cultures. To nature itself.

The Encounter is at its heart a story about ‘listening’, not 'hearing' but listening; to other, older narratives which, at the deepest level, form who we are, and if we do, we can imagine how we can 'begin' again.”
Simon McBurney – Complicité Artistic Director

Audiences must wear headphones to watch The Encounter online, or the effect of the binaural recording will be lost. Any headphones will work, but playing the film out of speakers will not give the same effect. It is free to watch, and available below until 25 May 2020.