Your Last Breath is a love story which spans 160 years through the inter-weaving of the stories of four characters. The play takes at its starting point the incredible true story of Anna, whose body froze after an extreme-skiing accident in 1999 and whose heart stopped for four hours, miraculously starting again once her body had been warmed again. The message that “one cannot be pronounced dead when cold” challenges our conception of the meaning of death. Through the second character in the play, the notion of death is again explored, but this time from the contemporary point of view of Freija, a successful business women, who is trying to come to terms with the recent death of her father and is travelling from London to Norway to scatter his ashes in the mountains. Moreover, the play has great historical depth, as it also oscillates between past and future: while in 1876, Christopher leaves his wife and young boy to map for the first time the unchartered mountains of Norway, Nicholas explains in 2036 how he had been “suspended in animation” as a new born, just as Anna was, and how these experiences could benefit other trauma patients across the world.
Using a variety of props to different purposes in the ever-changing set, a combination of perfectly acted monologue and dialogue as well as mesmerizing dancing, the inventive lightning and projection of abstract and figurative imagery, the staging of the play is highly imaginative and keeps the audience curious about the complex alternation of stories.