Irish Giant 2011

Role: Production Manager
Company: Cartoon De Salvo
Companies Address: 58 Holmewood Gardens, London. SW2 3NB

Companies/Artist: Show

The Irish Giant is the true tale of two remarkable men. John Hunter: a pioneering 18th-century surgeon obsessed with life, death - and abnormal bodies. And Charles Byrne: Georgian London's biggest celebrity, an 8ft-tall Irishman.

Developed in close collaboration with a medical ethicist and a medical historian, this work-in-progress performance plunges its bloody hands into Byrne's history to discover: who owns our bodies - and who should? Are we all just flesh and bone? and how do you live when death is daily shadowing your every step..?

Intellectually the production asks important and timeless questions about what it means to be human in the past and present, and of the relationship between science, faith and commerce. Can our belief in the 'usefulness' of science justify the disregard of other beliefs and value systems?

How 'valuable' is human life?

Cartoon de Salvo's brand new show The Irish Giant is a work-in-progress production. Following a period of research with their science advisers and short residencies at New Greenham Arts and BAC, they spent time in London and one week at Warwick reworking the piece to the Centre for the History of Medicine's length and venue specifications.

© Pictures by Edmund Collier