This may not have been a brief encounter, but it was brilliant! According to Simon McBurney, the Amazon rainforest has no regard for western time frames, and neither, apparently, does he. The Encounter took several years to write, or rather, to create, and the result relies almost entirely on sound. Each seat in the Old Vic’s main theatre is fitted with a set of headphones that feeds McBurney’s voice into our ears. The textured foam backdrop that stretches up to the ceiling not only provides a dry environment for the sound, but also allows for the clever light design to reflect both the weather, and the protagonist’s ever worsening mind set.
