We were so excited to hear just before Christmas that Mark Wheeller’s play that tells Dan’s story will become a GCSE drama set text next year. ’I Love You, Mum – I Promise I Won’t Die’ will be in great company on the Eduqas syllabus.
The other six set plays will be:
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- An Inspector Calls by J.B.Priestley
- Find Me by Olwen Wymark
- Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman
- Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah
- The IT by Vivienne Franzmann
This is what Dan’s mum Fiona – and our director and founder – had to say:
“It’s absolutely amazing, and more than we could ever have imagined when we started working as hard as we could to try to prevent anyone else’s child come to harm from drugs. So many more teenagers will get to experience this play with its important messages of choice and risk, of friendship, love, loss, forgiveness. And come to feel they know Dan, and to care about him and what happened to him, because that’s what the play seems to do.
“It was seven years ago this January that Dan came and found me before he headed off to a party, so he could give me a hug, tell me he loved me, and make the usual joke, promising he wouldn’t die. The next day we were in the liver intensive care unit at Kings, watching him do just that. Now these last words of Dan’s are the title of a play, that teenagers across the UK and around the world will be sitting in exam halls answering questions about.
“I wish there was a better word for all these things than bittersweet. Bitter comes nowhere close, and neither does sweet. Perhaps there are just no words.”
