Taking Breath

Elliot, a young eco-warrior, has fallen from a tree-top during a protest and now lies comatose in a hospital bed. When he fell, he slipped into the past, meeting Lucy, a troubled servant-girl and suffragette from 1913. Elliot saves Lucy's life and, by doing so, is pushed back to consciousness, but he continues to call out, in anguish, for Lucy. Alana, excluded from school for selling drugs, passionately follows all Elliot's TV news coverage and, by strange coincidence, it becomes evident that it was Alana's great-grandmother that Elliot had saved. She is able to assist Elliot's recovery as well as using the past to find peace for herself. This remarkable and timely one-act play, from the author of The Gut Girls, was specially commissioned for the BT National Connections scheme for young people in 1999.