DNA — Paper 1 Section B (Post-1914 drama)

Dennis Kelly's DNA (2007, written for the National Theatre Connections programme) is one of the shortest set texts on Edexcel 1ET0/01 Section B but one of the most concentrated. The whole 40-mark essay (32 AO1+AO2, 8 AO4) hinges on reading the play as a study of group morality under pressure. AO3 is not assessed in this section.

Form and structure

A four-act play with twelve short scenes that rotate between three locations: a field, a wood, and a street. The stripped, location-based structure forces the audience to track moral change in the same characters across three settings. The dialogue is fragmented, interrupted, full of half-finished sentences — Kelly writes the way teenagers actually speak.

The play opens in medias res: the cover-up has already begun. We piece together what happened to Adam through the group's responses, never through a clean exposition.

Themes that score

• Group dynamics and peer pressure — the group makes a moral choice no individual member would make alone. Kelly anatomises crowd cowardice.
• Leadership and power — Phil's silent calculation, Cathy's sadism, Leah's anxious chatter. Power keeps shifting.
• Moral cowardice — almost every character knows the cover-up is wrong; almost none speak. Kelly indicts silence, not action.
• Identity and language — Leah's monologues about bonobos, happiness and language are the play's philosophical spine. She is the only character who thinks in public.
• Adam's return — the play's structural shock. Adam survives and is killed again, this time deliberately. Kelly forces the audience to reckon with the second crime.

Characters worth knowing

• Phil — eats throughout, says little, plans everything. The disturbing image of moral coldness as ordinary appetite.
• Leah — the conscience the play almost has; her monologues to a near-silent Phil are dramatic monologue inside a group play.
• Cathy — escalates with relish; one of Kelly's clearest portraits of how cruelty can become identity.
• Brian — broken by the cover-up; ends drugged and reduced.
• Adam — onstage briefly but the play's moral weight.

Common essay traps

• Treating the play as naturalistic. Kelly writes it as a fable; the missing names of place and the absence of adults are deliberate.
• Forgetting AO4 (8 of the 40 marks). Spell Kelly, DNA (italicised), in medias res, dramatic irony correctly.
• Writing only about the cover-up. The play's most morally exposed moment is the second killing.