Yahoo Sports Giant, Aldeburgh Festival: this sombre, haunting premiere measures up to its mighty subject
“Death brings knowledge,” asserts the surgeon as he prepares for his latest anatomical adventure. Chalked drawings fill a blackboard; a vial of blood hints at grisly intention. John Hunter’s obsession with the human body underpins Giant, the new opera by Sarah Angliss that opened this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. Two coffins bookend the performance. The first is tiny and cradled – it reveals a swaddled body with a finely haired head, an unsettling sight and the reason for a note outside the theatre with a trigger warning for infant mortality. The second is enormous – large enough to contain a near-eight-foot man, the titular character and the subject of Hunter’s enduring fascination.
Ross Sutherland bases his libretto on the real-life story of Charles Byrne, the 18th-century Irish man whose unusual size led him to a life of semi-enslavement in a London freak show. After diagnosing Byrne’s (Karim Sulayman) imminent death, Hunter (Jonathan Gunthorpe) asks to use his body for medical research, a request that is met with horror by the giant, whose final wishes are to be buried at sea. In a clear case of nominative determinism, the surgeon “whores the vessel”, stealing the body for his own gruesome needs.
Angliss traverses time in a score that features viola de gamba, theremin and bells. The instrumentalists horseshoe the stage and the centuries collide; recorder is next to laptop. Pre-recorded sound merges with music made in real-time: Angliss’s electronics are subtle, subversive, sly – the only bangs are those made by Sulayman as he slams the on-stage door to his quarters.
For all the warnings, the staging is similarly show-don’t-tell – a blood-splattered apron here, a nose bleed there – and all the better for it. A hat, 90s-inspired Buffalo-style platform shoes and a stepped stage give the illusion of Sulayman’s additional height; careful lighting creates oversized shadows that fill the open wall behind. When the light turns on the audience, we unwittingly become student medics in a lecture theatre, learning the art of grave robbery from Hunter’s assistant (the captivating Steven Beard).
As Angliss began work on Giant in 2018, a campaign was underway to remove Byrne’s skeleton from the Hunterian Museum where the eponymous surgeon’s collection is housed. Earlier this year, its owners the Royal College of Surgeons announced that the remains would be taken out of public view and kept in storage. Onstage, a large femur is held to the light and Sulayman’s haunting tenor filters in from the beyond. I make a note to check my donor card.
