Seeing Giant has given me an idea!

We saw the first public performance of Sarah Angliss’s opera Giant at Snape on Friday evening. It graphically and melodically tells the story of how 18th century anatomist John Hunter befriended the 8ft tall Charles Byrne, with a view to buying, dissecting then displaying his body when he died.

Byrne did not want this to happen, but Hunter bought the body, bribing his friend with £500 to give him the corpse and continue to Margate where his empty coffin was buried at sea. For more than 200 years his skeleton was was displayed at London’s Hunterian Museum although when the museum re-opened after a period of closure, when Byrne’s wishes were finally accepted and his skeleton removed from display.

By coincidence, the next evening we sat in the concert hall behind Stephen Beard, who had appeared in Giant as Howison, Hunter’s assistant and it would appear his go between, buying corpses from London’s body snatchers, as post mortem dissection was then only allowed on the bodies of hanged criminals, and they were in short supply. Stephen told us that they’d rehearsed for six weeks, but that no more performances were planned after that weekend.

The opera was brilliant, grabbing and held my attention, partly because it was excellent, but also because unlike Byrne I have willingly volunteered to have my body put on public display after my death. I carry a Bodyworlds donor card and when the time comes, will be shipped to the lab at Guben in Germany for plastination, and then go somewhere in the world on public display.

Of course becoming a public exhibit after death is not for everyone, but as a writer and social entrepreneur, I’d rather do something useful after I die, and not just rot in a grave or be cremated. People today don’t think enough about death, and sponsoring a run of Giant performances could do much to make us think about our mortality in an entertaining and thought provoking way.