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by Dennis Kelly
What you study: The whole play. It is in four sections, headed One to Four. Sections One, Two and Three each have four scenes and Four has two, and within every section the scenes move through the same places: a street, a field, a wood, then a field again (Four has only the street and the field). Because page numbers differ between editions, this guide locates each moment by section and scene: One, scene 3 is the third scene of section One, in the wood. For AQA GCSE English Literature (8702) the play is a modern text on Paper 2, Section A: you answer one essay question from a choice of two, no extract is printed and no copy of the play is allowed. For OCR GCSE English Literature (J352) it is a modern drama text on the paper Exploring modern and literary heritage texts, Section A: an extract from DNA is printed beside an unseen extract from another modern play, you compare the two, and then you answer a second question on the rest of the play, which in recent papers has asked you to explore another moment in DNA. Copies of the text are not allowed in the OCR exam either.
The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.
How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.
Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.
Moment 1 of 17 · One, scene 1
Jan and Mark meet in a street. Mark has told Jan that someone they know is dead, and in quick, disbelieving exchanges she checks that he is serious. The scene ends with a question neither can answer.
“What are we going to do?”
Who
Why it matters
Sets the pattern for the whole play: each section opens with Jan and Mark hinting at news before the audience knows what it means.
Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.
“Alright. New rule; that word is banned.”
John Tate, One, scene 3 (a wood)
Lou keeps saying that Adam is dead, and John Tate responds by forbidding the word. It is funny because it is so childish, but it shows how the group will handle everything that follows: by controlling language instead of facing facts. The confident semicolon and the word rule make a leader’s voice out of what is really panic.
“You crying little piece of filth.”
John Tate, to Brian, One, scene 3 (a wood)
Having made everyone else declare they are on his side, John Tate turns on Brian, the one person crying. The insult reduces Brian to dirt, and the word “little” adds contempt to disgust. Brian’s tears are the only honest response in the scene, so one of the group’s first acts after Adam’s fall is to punish grief. Some revision lists drop “little”; learn the line as printed here.
“Will he do anything? What won’t he do?”
Mark, describing the attack on Adam, One, scene 3 (a wood)
Mark recalls what the group was thinking as Adam went along with each humiliation. The two questions turn a boy into an experiment: the game was to find the limit of what he would do to belong. Kelly shows that Adam’s longing to be accepted is exactly what made him a target, and that the group knew it.
“Not to hit him, just for the laugh.”
Mark, describing the attack on Adam, One, scene 3 (a wood)
Mark insists the first stone was thrown in fun. The phrase “just for the laugh” is how bullies excuse themselves, and Kelly lets Mark repeat the language of laughter until it becomes damning. The audience can see what Mark cannot: that there is no safe version of throwing stones at a frightened boy on a grille above a shaft.
“And the shock on his face is so... funny.”
Mark, One, scene 3 (a wood)
The ellipsis is where Mark hesitates, searching for a word, and the word he lands on is the worst one possible. Kelly makes the audience wait for it, so the pause becomes a moment of recognition: this is how cruelty feels from inside a group. Mark describes the stone hitting Adam’s head in the present tense, as if he is reliving it.
“Better than ordinary life.”
Cathy, One, scene 3 (a wood)
Cathy enters grinning while Brian cries, and finds the crisis exciting. The comparative “Better” reveals that for her what everyone believes is Adam’s death is an entertainment, a break from boredom. It is the first sign of the appetite that will lead her to frame the postman and, by the end, to run the group. Kelly plants her whole journey in four words.
“Chimps are evil.”
Leah, One, scene 4 (a field)
Leah contrasts chimpanzees, which she says kill and torture each other to rise in the group, with bonobos, which care for the injured. The blunt, three-word judgement sounds childish, but the speech comes straight after the group has agreed to cover up Adam’s death, so the audience knows which species the group resembles. The title’s biology becomes a moral question.
“It’s pouring into the school, grief, grief is making them happy.”
Leah, Two, scene 2 (a field)
Leah notices that since Adam’s disappearance everyone is getting along. The image of grief pouring like water suggests something that floods and cleanses, and the repetition of “grief” shows Leah stumbling over the paradox. It is one of the play’s darkest ironies: the lie has made the group kinder, which is exactly why nobody wants to end it.
“the man who kidnapped Adam doesn’t actually exist, does he.”
Leah, Two, scene 3 (a wood)
The police have arrested a suspect, and Leah states the obvious truth. Kelly writes the tag question “does he” with a full stop, not a question mark, so it first lands flatly, as a statement, before she presses it again as a real question. Her halting build-up to the line, full of false starts, shows how hard it has become to say something true in this group, and Lou’s reply, that the police have got him anyway, shows how little the truth now counts.
“You told us to get DNA evidence. We got DNA evidence.”
Cathy, Two, scene 3 (a wood)
Cathy defends her decision to find a real postman who fits the invented description. Her two short sentences, repeating the same phrase, make her sound like a pupil who has followed instructions perfectly. That is the horror of it: she has done what she was told, only more so, and does not seem to see why framing an innocent man is a problem.
“I’m crying because I’m lying and I feel terrible inside.”
Brian, Two, scene 3 (a wood)
Brian explains why he cannot face the police again: they believe him because he cries, but he cries because he is lying. The internal rhyme of crying and lying binds the two together, and the plain phrase “terrible inside” is childlike and honest. Guilt shows on Brian’s face, and the police read it as proof that his story is true.
“This is a bad situation. We didn’t want this situation.”
Phil, to Brian, Two, scene 3 (a wood)
Phil lays a hand on Brian’s shoulder and speaks with calm, flat repetition, as if explaining something reasonable. The word “situation” turns a boy’s death and an innocent man’s arrest into an abstract problem to be managed. The calm is what makes it menacing: it is the voice of someone about to threaten a friend with death.
“You’ll land on Adam’s corpse and you’ll rot together.”
Phil, to Brian, Two, scene 3 (a wood)
This is the climax of Phil’s threat, delivered after a step-by-step description of throwing Brian down the shaft. The noun “corpse” is brutal in a group whose first leader tried to ban even the word dead, and “rot together” makes the threat physical and permanent. The future tense, repeated, makes it sound less like a threat than a plan, which is what Brian hears.
“Maybe being seen as heroes is making them behave like heroes.”
Leah, to Phil, Three, scene 2 (a field)
Leah is describing the group’s good deeds since Adam’s memorial, Jan helping a first year and Mark doing charity work. The repetition of “heroes” shows her working out a disturbing idea: that reputation, even a false one, shapes behaviour. It is the play’s sharpest point about groups. The cover-up has not only hidden a crime, it has made the criminals nicer, which is exactly why nobody wants it to end.
“Your brain is entirely waffle, single-mindedly waffle”
Leah, to Phil, Three, scene 2 (a field)
Leah has announced she is running away, and Phil has simply carried on with his waffle, buttering it and then spreading jam. Her joke turns the waffle into a metaphor for his mind, and the pun on waffle (nonsense talk) is ironic, since Phil is the one who never talks. In the same breath she says she admires him, which shows how badly she still wants his attention.
“I’m in charge. Everyone is happier.”
Phil, to Leah, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Leah insists they must take Adam home. Phil’s answer is two short declaratives that sound unanswerable, and he follows them by asking whether one person matters more than everyone. The logic is monstrous but it is not stupid: the group really is happier. Kelly makes the audience face the argument rather than simply dismiss the person making it.
“It’s Adam, Phil, Adam! We used to go to his birthday parties”
Leah, to Phil, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Leah answers Phil’s abstract argument with a name and a memory. Repeating “Adam” insists that he is a person, not a problem, and the birthday parties recall a shared childhood. The rest of her speech admits they used to mock him even then, so her memory is also a confession: the cruelty did not start at the grille.
“That was great!”
Brian, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Brian says this after Phil has pulled a plastic bag over his head to show him what to do. His delight is shocking because the audience understands the demonstration and Brian, medicated and childlike, does not. The exclamation is the play’s bleakest joke: the most vulnerable person in the group is being turned into the weapon.
“You just do what Cathy says.”
Phil, to Brian, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Phil’s instruction is simple, almost kind, and it hands the killing to someone else. The instruction never names what Brian is to do, because the bag has already shown him, so Phil decides Adam’s fate without putting it into words, while Cathy directs and Brian obeys. Power in this scene lies in giving orders that sound like nothing at all.
“He’s dead, everyone thinks he’s dead. What difference will it make?”
Phil, to Leah, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Leah begs Phil to stop as Cathy and Brian prepare to go after Adam. Phil’s reply turns a belief into a fact: because everyone thinks Adam is dead, he may as well be. The calm rhetorical question makes a killing sound like a small administrative correction. Leah’s answer, that Adam is alive, is the simplest truth in the play, and it changes nothing.
“nothing dead, that’s the rule”
Adam, Three, scene 3 (a wood)
Adam explains how he has survived: he eats insects, grass and leaves, and once a rabbit, but after a dead bird made him sick he will eat nothing dead. It is a strange, touching moral code from a boy living wild, and it contrasts with the group, who decide that he might as well be dead because that suits them better.
“Cathy doesn’t care. She’s too busy running things.”
Richard, to Phil, Four, scene 2 (a field)
In his list of what has happened to everyone, Richard reports that Cathy is now in charge. The short, flat sentences fit the shock: the excitable girl from the first wood scene has become the leader. Kelly ends the play with power passing to the character with the fewest limits, which leaves the audience with no reassurance at all.
“She cut a first year’s finger off”
Richard, to Phil, Four, scene 2 (a field)
Richard reports this about Cathy as a rumour, and adds that he only knows what people say. That uncertainty matters: whether or not it happened, the story is how Cathy now rules, through a reputation for violence against younger pupils. The group that began by tormenting Adam has made cruelty its method of government.
“How do you think they’re living?”
Richard, to Phil, Four, scene 2 (a field)
Richard has described a cloud of fluff on the hill that made him certain there is life on other planets, and he asks Phil to imagine it. It is the play’s last attempt at wonder, and its last unanswered question. Richard repeats it, as Leah once repeated her questions, and Phil’s silence suggests that nobody left in the group can imagine a different way of living.
Lord of the Flies
Another AQA modern text about young people without adults turning on the weakest among them, though Golding brings adults back at the end and Kelly does not.
An Inspector Calls
Set by both AQA and OCR, it asks the same question about shared responsibility for what happens to one vulnerable person, and who accepts it.
Blood Brothers
Another AQA modern drama text about young people, violence and responsibility, whose Narrator can be compared with the way Jan and Mark frame each section of DNA.
Leave Taking
A modern play set by both AQA and OCR about teenagers under pressure; where DNA removes adults altogether, Winsome Pinnock builds her play around a mother trying to protect and steer her daughters.