I admit that during I Love You, Mum—I Promise I Won't Die, the true story of the death of 16-year-old Daniel Spargo-Mabbs, I quietly demolished three hankies.
This is a moving piece of writing about Daniel's death that came tragically and too soon, and for which playwright Mark Wheeller has used the testimony of those close to the young man to create his portrait and present some of the key events around his passing.
Wheeller's cannot have been an easy task. He collected the accounts of Daniel's school-friends through a series of interviews and assembled them alongside those of his parents. The first half of the play, I Love You, Mum, intersperses flashbacks with Wheeller's (David Chafer) thoughtful encounters with Daniel's fellow pupils, some of whose testimony is so simple and honest it is impossible not to react to its emotional tug.
In the second half, I Promise I Won't Die, the focus shifts to the family and what they went through, with his parents and brothers addressing the audience, Wheeller's role now implied rather than manifest.
The small cast double up and more on roles with Amy Zoldan standing out as having the more assured range of characterisations to differentiate between those assigned to her.
Director Elliot Montgomery paces the first half energetically, reflecting both its bitty nature—picking up clues from different sources to build a composite picture of Daniel—and the kinetic vitality of the young people involved.
It slows down very significantly for I Promise I Won't Die, lingering on the harrowing descriptions given both by the first responder and Daniel's mother, of Daniel's physical trauma after taking a fatal dose of ecstasy and collapsing at a rave.
The lagging pace goes on to capture the tortuous limbo that overwhelms the family of seriously injured victims, and we see the time drag for Daniel's parents, brother and girlfriend as they wait for a turning point balancing their desperate hopes with more realistic expectations.
The second half goes over a few known events, and with each half of the play bookended with filmed sequences from the interviews with Daniel's parents, the structure is rather fragmentary.
Even as emotionally invested as I was watching I Love You, Mum—I Promise I Won't Die, I felt aware of being outside the target audience for the play, which seeks to engage young people on the subject of drug use.
In this respect, the play's merits lie in serving its strategy without falling into preachiness, but away from that, I found it lacking in the content and perspective routinely built into a play. It makes the lightest of landings on issues such as media intrusion, forgiveness and justice that would have given it some solidity.
Without this substance, the play succeeds in being powerfully emotive, but after an hour, I wanted to be released. I salute its awesome truthfulness, but I would have swapped some strength of emotion for some depth.