The Encounter might just be the under-the-radar headliner for three of Australia’s major arts festivals this year. With a modest solo performer on a relatively bare stage, it may not have the sheer dramatic wattage of Cheek By Jowl’s Measure for Measure, or the flash, bang and wallop of Barrie Kosky’s Saul, but the show, which arrives in Sydney from an acclaimed Broadway run before heading to Perth and Adelaide, has plenty to say, both about its own art form and the state of the world today.

In 1969, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre disappeared up the Amazon. Searching for a ‘lost’ tribe of Mayoruna Indians (commonly nicknamed the ‘cat people’ because of the bristles they stick through perforations in their upper lip and nose), McIntyre spent two months with a group on the move before he was able to find his way back to ‘civilisation’. Petru Popescu’s transcriptions of McIntyre’s accounts of his Mayoruna encounter and a subsequent search for the elusive birthplace of the Amazon river make up the book Amazon Beaming, the source material for Complicite’s latest stage work.

The British theatre company under the visionary leadership of Simon McBurney has been at the cutting edge of theatrical...