Edinburgh: The Encounter, International Conference Centre, review: 'spellbinding'

You are alone in the dense, almost inaccessible Amazon region of Brazil, 400 miles from "civilisation". The aim is to take photographs of an elusive, barely contacted tribes-people called the Mayoruna – to show the world what they look like. And, amazingly, you strike gold. There, suddenly, some of them are. You follow them, snapping as you go – failing, unlike Hansel and Gretel, to leave a trail behind you.

The story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre’s incredible 1969 encounter with “the cat people” (so named because of the whisker-like palm-spines adorning their lips and noses) is the stuff of a twisting, turning, thoroughly engrossing fairytale. And in re-telling it, in this brilliant solo show mounted by his much-travelled company Complicite, Simon McBurney adopts a high-tech bedside manner that places the audience in the role of wide-eyed – or should that be wide-eared? – children.

Clipped to every seat in the large, functional theatre suite at the International Conference Centre is a set of headphones. What you hear has the intimacy of someone whispering in your ears, as if snuggled up beside you. But, more than that, thanks to an array of sonic gadgetry, at the centre of which stands a ‘binaural’ pick-up device, mounted on a mannequin human head, the effect is fully immersive – so that you hear sounds from all sides, conjured with disconcerting pinpoint precision.

Close your eyes, and you can believe you’re in a far-flung corner of the world – gnats and mosquitoes buzzing skin-pricklingly close, birds hooting in the trees. Keep them open, as you are mainly bound to, and you are aware of McBurney – scruffy in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap – busily creating this perturbing, polyphonic paradise.

He partly, often amiably and entertainingly, chats in his own voice, confiding details about his inquisitive daughter and domestic life (samples of which we hear). He switches too – by putting on an accent, and talking into a pitch-lowering microphone – into McIntyre’s growly baritone. And with the help of a backstage team and looper-pedals, McBurney the magician can turn the sloshing of a water bottle into the lapping sound of a river; he can scrunch old VHS tape to evoke a trek through humid undergrowth; he transforms a crisp-packet crackle into a roaring fire.

Such is the power of imagination that we are conscious of the artifice but can lose ourselves, like McIntyre, in this alien terrain. We are miles away, yet somehow connected. Through this mesmerising theatrical trickery, McBurney captures the metaphysical spirit – as well as the pulse-quickening heart – of the experience, which was recorded in the 1991 factional novel Amazon Beaming by the Romanian Petru Popescu. McIntyre, who died in 2003, maintained that he developed the ability to communicate telepathically – “beam” – with certain of the Mayoruna, and in living among them entered a different state of mind, and time.

Somehow, over two hours that leave its charismatic star exhausted and the audience elated, we too are taken into a synapse-altering space, floating free of modernity’s plastic trappings. Does that sound like a far-fetched claim? Honestly, with this head-turning, spellbinding show, hearing is believing.

Until Aug 23. Tickets: 0131 473 2000; eif.co.uk