Modern text: DNA — AQA GCSE English Literature Revision Notes

What you'll learn

• How Kelly structures the play in short scenes across three locations, and why the shape matters
• Phil's silence and sudden authority, and what the play says about how leaders emerge
• Leah's monologues, and why the character who talks most is the one nobody listens to
• The group's transformation after the crime, and the play's most disturbing claim
• Themes of responsibility, complicity, and the difference between a gang and a society
• How to approach the AQA Paper 2 modern texts question, where no extract is given

Key terms and definitions

Ensemble play — a drama with no single protagonist, where the group is the subject.

Cyclical structure — a play that returns to its starting arrangement. DNA opens and closes with Mark and Jan.

Monologue — an extended speech by one character. Leah's are delivered to Phil, who does not reply.

Non-linear staging — scenes that cut between locations rather than following continuous action.

Complicity — sharing responsibility for a wrong by participating in or concealing it.

Moral vacuum — a situation in which no agreed standard of right conduct operates.

Scapegoat — someone blamed for a crime they did not commit. The postman serves this function.

Bystander effect — the tendency of individuals in a group to fail to act, each assuming someone else will.

Dramatic irony — the audience knowing what characters do not, sustained by Adam's survival.

Core concepts

Structure: three places, short scenes

Kelly builds the play from brief scenes rotating between three locations, and the rotation is the design.

A street — Mark and Jan, always alone, always arriving with news. They open and close the play and punctuate it throughout, reporting developments in fragments and half-finished sentences. They function almost as a chorus.

A field — Leah and Phil. She talks continuously; he eats and says nothing until, at intervals, he issues an instruction. These scenes carry the play's thinking.

A wood — the full group. This is where decisions are made and where the action happens.

The short scenes and rapid cutting create the sense of events running ahead of anyone's control. Because the audience learns what happened through reports rather than seeing it, the play never dramatises the original incident — the audience, like the characters, only ever receives an account.

The cyclical ending returns to the street, with the group dispersed and the arrangement restored. Nothing has been resolved and very little has been punished.

What actually happens

The group has bullied Adam badly — stealing from him, burning him, making him eat leaves, and finally making him walk on a grille over a drop, throwing stones at him until he falls. They believe he is dead.

Phil takes charge. He has been silent throughout the panic, then produces a complete plan: invent a man who does not exist, plant false evidence, and give the police a suspect. The group supplies the fabricated details together.

The plan works too well. A postman is arrested, and it emerges he matches the invented description and has a history that makes him plausible. An innocent man goes to prison.

Adam is alive. Brian finds him living in a hedge, injured and confused, having survived the fall. His return would expose everything.

Phil has him killed. He instructs the group and it is done. The play does not stage it.

Crucially, Kelly makes the group thrive on the crime. They become organised, successful and happy. The school's results improve, the group's members find purpose, and several of them are visibly better off than before. That is the play's most uncomfortable claim: the crime and the cover-up produce a functioning community.

Phil

Phil is one of modern drama's strangest leading characters because he barely speaks and does almost nothing visible.

For most of the play he eats — a waffle, a muffin, an ice cream — while Leah talks at him. He does not respond, does not comfort her, and does not argue.

When he does speak, he issues complete, detailed plans with no visible deliberation and no emotion. The group obeys instantly, because in a panic anyone with a plan commands.

He is entirely amoral rather than cruel. He never expresses hatred for Adam or enjoyment of what he orders. His decisions are practical: this is the problem, this is the solution. That is precisely what makes him frightening.

At the end he stops eating and stops speaking altogether. Whether this is guilt, collapse or simple disengagement is left open, and an answer can argue any of them provided it uses the detail of the eating as evidence.

Leah

Leah is the play's conscience and its most articulate character, and she is ignored throughout.

She talks constantly — about bonobos and chimpanzees, about happiness, about whether Phil likes her, about whether she is a good person. The monologues seem digressive and are not: her comparison of two primate species, one peaceful and one violent, is the play's central question about human groups posed early and never answered.

She is the only character who raises the moral objection clearly, and she raises it repeatedly. Nobody engages with her. Phil eats.

She also kills her own pet, in an episode she describes with distress, which prevents the audience from reading her as simply good. Kelly gives her the right instincts and makes her complicit anyway.

Her disappearance before the end — she leaves, and Phil does not react — removes the last voice that might have objected.

The rest of the group

Cathy enjoys it. She becomes more violent as the play progresses, takes pleasure in the drama, and by the end is described as having become genuinely dangerous. She is the clearest evidence that the crime released something rather than merely covering something up.

Brian deteriorates. Initially frightened and tearful, he is pressured into identifying the invented man to the police and ends the play medicated and detached. He is the group's casualty.

John Tate leads at the start through threat and bluster — he tries to ban a word — and vanishes from the play entirely, reportedly having found religion. His authority collapses the moment a real problem appears.

Richard narrates for part of the play and is the one who tells Phil at the end that things have changed. He is ordinary, adaptable and survives.

Danny wants to be a dentist and is concerned throughout with how events will affect his university application. His self-interest is the most recognisable and the most quietly damning thing in the play.

Mark and Jan report. Their fragmented exchanges give the audience information while refusing to give it in a form that assigns responsibility to anyone.

Adam appears only once, after his return. He cannot remember clearly, speaks with difficulty, and describes living in the hedge almost contentedly. Giving him a single scene, late, means the audience meets the victim as a person only just before he is killed.

Themes

Responsibility and complicity. Nobody makes the decision alone, so nobody feels responsible. Kelly is precise about how a group distributes guilt until none of it lands.

Leadership in a vacuum. John Tate's authority rests on fear and collapses; Phil's rests on having an answer. The play suggests that groups under pressure will follow whoever offers certainty, regardless of what is being proposed.

The gang and society. The group develops rules, roles, a shared story and a collective interest in maintaining it. Kelly's suggestion is that this is not the opposite of a society but a small and honest version of one.

Silence and communication. Leah talks and is unheard; Phil is silent and obeyed; Mark and Jan report without ever describing; Adam can no longer explain himself. Almost nobody in the play communicates successfully.

Guilt and its absence. Only Brian and Leah suffer. The others adapt, and some flourish. The play denies the audience the reassurance of seeing wrongdoing punished.

Context

Kelly wrote DNA in 2007 for National Theatre Connections, a programme commissioning plays for youth theatre companies. That origin explains the large cast of roughly equal parts, the minimal staging and the short scenes.

It was written during a period of intense British media anxiety about teenagers, gangs and knife crime, and the play resists that framing. It offers no broken homes, no deprivation and no explanation. The characters are ordinary, and Kelly withholds the causes an audience expects to be given.

The title works on several levels: the police evidence that drives the cover-up, the genetic inheritance that might explain behaviour, and the suggestion that this capacity is simply in people rather than caused by circumstance. Leah's bonobo speech is the clearest statement of that reading.

The play's refusal to stage either death is a deliberate choice. Everything terrible happens offstage and arrives as report, which implicates the audience in the same second-hand relationship to violence the characters have.

Worked examples

Example 1: Character question

How does Kelly present Phil as a powerful character?

Track the mechanism of his power rather than asserting it. Establish the contrast between his silence and his authority; note that he speaks only to give complete plans; show the group obeying without question at each point. Analyse the eating as a staging device — a leader physically occupied with something trivial while ordering a killing. Then use the ending, where he stops eating and speaking, and argue for one reading of that silence while acknowledging the alternatives.

Example 2: Theme question

How does Kelly explore the theme of responsibility?

Organise around distribution. Nobody bullies Adam alone, nobody decides the cover-up alone, and the second killing is carried out by the group on Phil's instruction. Show how Kelly uses this to prevent guilt attaching to any individual. Then contrast the two characters who do feel it — Brian, who breaks, and Leah, who objects and is ignored — with those who prosper. Conclude on the ending, where the absence of punishment is the point.

Example 3: Writing without an extract

The modern texts question provides no extract, so recall must be precise. This play is short and episodic, which helps: learn the order of events, a few exact short phrases for Leah and Phil, and two or three details of staging such as what Phil is eating in a given scene. Where exact wording escapes you, refer confidently to the moment; accurate reference earns credit and an approximate quotation in quotation marks does not.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Treating it as a play about bullying. The bullying is the situation; the subject is what a group does afterwards.

Ignoring Leah. She has more lines than anyone and carries the play's argument. Answers that focus only on Phil miss half of it.

Making Phil a villain. He shows no cruelty or enjoyment. His amorality is more disturbing than malice would be.

Forgetting the group improves. Kelly's most provocative claim is that the crime made them happier and more effective.

Overlooking the staging. The three locations, the short scenes and the offstage deaths are all choices worth analysing.

Explaining the characters' behaviour with background. Kelly deliberately gives them none. Inventing deprivation or broken homes contradicts the text.

Exam technique for "Modern text: DNA"

On AQA Paper 2 the modern texts question is worth 30 marks plus 4 for AO4, and you should spend about 45 minutes on it. You choose one question from two, so read both before starting.

Plan for five minutes. Three or four developed points, each anchored to a specific scene, with one reserved for structure or staging.

Write about Kelly making choices for an audience: "Kelly keeps both deaths offstage so that the audience" is analysis; "Adam dies" is plot.

Because the play is short, examiners expect accurate detail. Knowing which location a scene happens in, and who is present, is worth having.

Keep four minutes at the end for spelling and punctuation, which carry marks on this question.

Quick revision summary

• Three locations in rotation — street (Mark and Jan), field (Leah and Phil), wood (the group) — in short, fast scenes
• Both deaths happen offstage; the audience only ever receives reports
• Phil is silent, eats throughout, and is obeyed because he supplies certainty in a panic
• Leah talks constantly, raises the only moral objection, is ignored, and leaves before the end
• The group thrives after the crime — the play's most disturbing claim
• Cathy becomes dangerous, Brian breaks, Danny worries about his university application, John Tate simply vanishes
• An innocent postman is imprisoned; Adam survives the fall and is killed on his return
• Themes: complicity, leadership in a vacuum, the gang as a society, failed communication, unpunished guilt
• Context: written 2007 for NT Connections; Kelly withholds the social explanations the audience expects
• Paper 2, roughly 45 minutes, 30 marks + 4 for AO4, no extract — precise recall matters