Structure & Stagecraft
The Four-Act Structure
DNA is divided into four acts, each cycling through three locations: a street, a field, and a wood. This cyclical structure gives the play its distinctive rhythm. Each time we return to a location, the situation has worsened. The street scenes grow more tense, the field scenes more desperate, and the wood scenes more dangerous. Kelly uses this repetition to show escalation: same places, but the moral temperature drops each time.
The four acts are not equal in length. Acts 1 and 2 are the longest, establishing the crime and the cover-up. Act 3 is shorter but more intense, delivering the reversal of Adam’s survival. Act 4 is the shortest — a compressed, devastating coda that shows the aftermath. This structural contraction mirrors the group’s moral collapse: as their humanity shrinks, so does the play.
Each act cycles through three locations: street (Mark and Jan as chorus), field (Leah and Phil’s relationship), and wood (group decisions). The acts get progressively shorter as moral collapse accelerates, with Act 4 as a brief, devastating coda.
The Three Locations
Each location serves a distinct dramatic purpose. The street is where Mark and Jan deliver exposition. They function as a Greek chorus, updating the audience in fragmented, overlapping dialogue. The street represents the public face of the crisis — the version of events that the outside world might see.
The field is Leah and Phil’s space. It represents the private, emotional dimension of the crisis. Here, Leah delivers her philosophical monologues — about bonobos, about happiness, about whether Phil needs her — while Phil eats and says nothing. The field is where introspection happens, though it is one-sided: only Leah reflects.
The wood is where the group meets and where Phil delivers his orders. It represents the collective — the space where group decisions are made and individual morality is overridden. The wood is also where Adam fell, giving it a symbolic weight as the scene of the original crime. Kelly’s choice to have the group return to the wood for their deliberations is darkly ironic: they keep returning to the place of their guilt.
Kelly structures the play around character pairs. Mark and Jan are always together, finishing each other’s sentences. Leah and Phil are always together in the field, their dysfunctional relationship playing out in parallel with the group’s crisis. Even in the wood, characters tend to operate in pairs or small clusters rather than as a unified group.
This pairing creates contrasts that illuminate the play’s themes. Phil’s silence is thrown into sharp relief by Leah’s speech. Mark and Jan’s shared narration contrasts with the isolation of characters like Brian (who breaks down alone) and Richard (who questions alone). Kelly uses these structural pairings to show that even within a group, people are fundamentally isolated by their different responses to moral crisis.
Offstage Violence
One of Kelly’s most distinctive choices is to keep nearly all violence offstage. The bullying of Adam, his fall, the framing of the innocent man, and much of Cathy’s violence are described rather than shown. We hear about them through Mark and Jan’s reports or through the group’s panicked discussions, but we do not witness them directly.
This technique serves several purposes. First, it makes the violence more disturbing, because the audience’s imagination fills in details that are worse than anything staging could show. Second, it implicates the audience in the retelling — just as the characters reconstruct and distort what happened, the audience must reconstruct it from fragments. Third, offstage violence keeps the focus on the characters’ responses rather than on the acts themselves — Kelly is less interested in what happened than in what people do afterwards.
Kelly keeps violence offstage to make it more disturbing (the audience imagines worse), to implicate the audience in reconstruction, and to focus on the characters’ responses rather than the acts themselves. This is a key AO2 point about dramatic method.
Leah’s Monologues as Dramatic Device
Leah’s monologues are the play’s philosophical spine. They are long, rambling, and apparently disconnected from the main plot — she talks about bonobos, about chimps, about whether happiness is real, about the nature of friendship. But each monologue connects thematically to the group’s crisis. The bonobos speech asks why humans choose violence over peace. The happiness speech asks whether the group can ever recover from what they have done. The friendship speech asks what it means to need someone who does not need you.
These monologues are delivered to Phil, who never responds. This creates a unique form of dramatic monologue — not a soliloquy (Phil is present) but not a dialogue (Phil does not reply). Leah is simultaneously speaking to Phil, to herself, and to the audience. Her increasing desperation — the monologues get longer and more frantic as the play progresses — mirrors the group’s moral disintegration. When she finally disappears in Act 4, the play loses its conscience, and the audience feels the absence.
Kelly’s stage directions are minimal and functional. He does not describe elaborate sets or detailed blocking. The most famous stage direction — “Phil is eating an ice cream” — is powerful precisely because of its simplicity. It tells us everything we need to know about Phil’s character in six words.
This minimalism gives directors enormous freedom in staging the play. It also reflects Kelly’s focus on language and character over spectacle. The play can be performed with almost no set — three playing areas, a few props — and this stripped-back quality makes it ideal for young performers (its original NT Connections purpose) while also concentrating the audience’s attention on what the characters say and do not say.