DNA

Dennis Kelly’s DNA, first staged in 2007, asks if cruelty and violence are inevitably how we make ourselves into groups. The play takes place in an unspecified location, where a gang of teenagers has to deal with the fallout from bullying an outsider to death. Adam, who wants to be part of the gang, has fallen fatally during a horrific initiation ritual. To get themselves out of trouble, the gang, guided by the normally taciturnUntalkative. Phil, frames an innocent man. This crime binds the group together and unites the wider community in mourning. But soon, cracks start to show. Members of the gang struggle with the guilt, and. When Adam reappears, Phil decides they have to have him killed again. The gang splits, and Leah, who voices the play’s sense that things might not have to be this way, leaves. Kelly says that when he wrote it, he was thinking about the War on Terror, which was often discussed as a “clash of civilisations” between “the West” and “Islam”. Questions of how far we ought to go to protect a group resonate in the dilemmasProblems or difficult situations, especially ones in which a choice must be made. faced by the gang. “What’s more important, one person or everyone?”, Phil asks, but by the time he does, it’s clear that violence is not enough to hold things together.