I Love You, Mum - I Promise I Won't Die (Plays for Young People)

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It is a fast-paced, tragic, vibrant piece of verbatim theatre, which should engage teenage readers, audiences and performers alike. I Love You, Mum - I Promise I Won't Die was commissioned by the charity set up in Daniel's memory to raise awareness about the danger of party drugs. He has three children and lives just outside the New Forest, with his wife Rachael, and Labrador, Dusty. It is far from a preachy ‘Don't Take Drugs’, PSHE-style lecture though, and as a dramatic work it serves as much more. Everyone loves Dan and at 16, he has plans, plenty of them – just losing his life isn’t one of them.

This short documentary, produced by Danny Sturrock, shows the journey of the play from the page to the stage and beyond, through interviews with Dan’s parents, Tim and Fiona, playwright Mark Wheeller, and members of the Oasis Youth Theatre cast, along with extracts of the original OYT production in 2016. Theatre in education is an effective genre to inform, to educate and to make real life situations relatable and to prompt us to ask questions about how and why things happen.The fact that Dan’s family shares their true story with Mark Wheeller and this theatre company, is generous and heartfelt – and by doing so they hope it will help others to understand what happened and to learn from this experience and how to avoid it. By Easter it will have reached around 55,000 young people, and is a core component of our drug education programme.

This is thanks to its widespread appeal in schools and colleges since the very start, as well as the continuing popularity of our Theatre in Education touring productions.Towards the end of the play he performs the final moments between Dan and his girlfriend Jenna (Amy Zoldan) as she relives their final conversation. The opening image is of serene Dan, in a white T-shirt and jeans, holding glow sticks, heaven bound, the angel at a rave. Half Moon Theatre sits in the heart of Limehouse in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, spitting distance from the DLR and mainline station. For ‘I Love You, Mum – I Promise I Won’t Die’, Mark used verbatim theatre to take the actual words of Dan’s family and friends, recorded in a series of interviews, which were painstakingly transcribed and then turned into the script of this two-act play.

by Louisa Reid Published by Guppy Books Cassandra, narrator of this powerful verse novel, is a reluctant sixth former in a prestigious mixed school, formerly all boys, where toxic culture simmers.Most telling of all Amy Zoldan as Alice wrestles with her conscience as the person who everyone blames for Dan’s death. This fast-paced, powerful and emotionally-charged play, tells the true story of what happened to Dan, the choices he made and the impact on his family and friends – all told in their own words, from tragedy to redemption.