Structure & Stagecraft
The Four-Act Structure
DNA has a clear four-act structure, with each act representing an escalation in the group’s moral crisis. Act 1 reveals the crime and introduces the panic. Act 2 shows the cover-up in action. Act 3 introduces the twist — Adam is alive — and the group’s response grows darker. Act 4 shows the aftermath: fragmentation, silence, and no resolution. This structure creates a relentless sense of momentum, with each act raising the moral stakes.
Each act opens with a short prologue-like scene between Mark and Jan on a street. These street scenes function like a Greek chorus, drip-feeding information to the audience and establishing the emotional tone before the main action begins. The regularity of this pattern creates a ritualistic quality — the audience comes to expect the street scene and the escalation that follows.
The four-act structure creates relentless escalation: Act 1 (crime revealed), Act 2 (cover-up executed), Act 3 (Adam alive, Phil’s darker orders), Act 4 (aftermath with no resolution). Each act opens with a Mark-and-Jan street scene that functions like a chorus.
Paired Characters
Kelly structures his characters in pairs that mirror or contrast each other. Phil and Leah are the central pair: Phil is silent and powerful, Leah is verbal and powerless. Mark and Jan are a functional pair who speak in overlapping fragments, almost as a single voice. John Tate and Phil represent contrasting models of leadership — bluster versus strategy.
The most significant pairing shift occurs in Act 4, when Leah disappears and Richard takes her place in the field with Phil. This substitution is Kelly’s way of showing that moral conscience (Leah) has been replaced by passive curiosity (Richard). The play’s emotional centre has shifted from anguished questioning to empty chatter. This structural choice reinforces the bleak message: the capacity for genuine moral reflection is rare and easily lost.
Mark and Jan always appear together, never individually. They finish each other’s sentences and seem to share a single consciousness. Their overlapping, fragmented speech mimics the way teenagers actually communicate, but it also serves a dramatic purpose: by splitting the narrative between two speakers, Kelly makes the information feel uncertain and unreliable. The audience cannot be sure they are getting the full truth.
Their street scenes are placed outside the main locations (field, wood), giving them a detached perspective. They report on events rather than participating in them, which positions them as the audience’s link to the story — they know approximately what we know, and their growing unease mirrors our own.
Leah’s Monologues
Leah’s monologues are a distinctive structural feature of DNA. They are long, uninterrupted speeches delivered to Phil in the field. Phil never responds. The monologues cover seemingly unrelated topics — bonobos, the nature of happiness, whether chimps or humans are more violent — but they all connect thematically to the play’s central concerns about morality, empathy, and what it means to be human.
Structurally, the monologues create a dramatic pause between the tense wood scenes. They slow the pace and invite the audience to think about the broader implications of the group’s actions. Kelly uses them to embed philosophical ideas within a fast-moving thriller plot, giving the play intellectual depth beyond its surface narrative.
Offstage Action
One of Kelly’s most powerful structural choices is to keep the most violent and disturbing events offstage. The audience never sees Adam’s fall, the planting of evidence, the arrest of the postman, or whatever happens to Adam in Act 3. All of these events are described or implied through dialogue.
This technique has several effects. First, it creates ambiguity — the audience can never be completely sure what happened, because they are relying on unreliable narrators. Second, it forces the audience to imagine the violence themselves, which can be more disturbing than seeing it staged. Third, it keeps the focus on the group’s psychological reactions rather than on spectacle. Kelly is not interested in shocking the audience with graphic violence; he is interested in how ordinary people process and justify terrible acts.
Kelly keeps all violent events offstage. This creates ambiguity (the audience relies on unreliable accounts), forces the audience to imagine the worst, and keeps the focus on the characters’ psychological responses rather than on spectacle.
The Three Settings
The play alternates between three locations, each with its own function and atmosphere:
- The street — Mark and Jan’s prologue space. Public, exposed, transitional. Information is exchanged here but no decisions are made.
- The field — Phil and Leah’s private space. A place of reflection (Leah’s monologues) and emotional isolation (Phil’s silence). By Act 4, it becomes a space of total emptiness.
- The wood — the group’s meeting place. Hidden, enclosed, secretive. This is where decisions are made, plans are hatched, and moral lines are crossed. The wood’s associations with darkness and concealment mirror the group’s moral descent.
The three locations can be read symbolically. The street is the public world — normal, everyday life continuing around the crisis. The field is the inner world — Leah’s moral struggle and Phil’s emotional blankness. The wood is the hidden world — where the group’s darkest actions take place, concealed from society. The pattern of moving between these spaces suggests that the characters exist between public normality and private horror, never fully belonging to either.
Kelly gives almost no stage directions for these locations. This minimalism forces the audience to focus on the characters and their words rather than on visual spectacle. It also gives directors enormous creative freedom — the wood could be literally or metaphorically dark, the field could feel exposed or isolated.