Right vs. Wrong Theme Analysis

At the start of Dennis Kelly’s DNA, a group of teenagers at a school in London have already committed a heinous—albeit accidental—crime against one of their own. As the play unfolds, Kelly puts his characters in a pressure cooker, placing them at crossroads which force them, time and time again, to choose between right and wrong. The core group of teens overwhelmingly makes immoral and selfish decisions, and Kelly ultimately uses the play to argue that when faced with doing what’s right but difficult versus what’s wrong but easy, human beings will often choose to do the latter.

There are several moments throughout the play where Kelly’s characters are forced to choose between right and wrong. With few exceptions, the teen characters seek to save their own skins, advance their own interests, and preserve themselves over their peers—even though they have ample opportunity to right the courses of all their lives and face up to what they’ve done. When a group of London schoolmates—Mark, Jan, Cathy, Richard, Brian, Lou, John Tate, Leah, Phil, and Danny—begin to believe they are responsible for the death of Adam, one of their unpopular peers, they struggle with what to do. Though it’s not clear which members of the group, exactly, were present at the time of Adam’s death, what is clear is that after being pelted with stones while he balanced on a grille above a local mineshaft, Adam fell into the shaft and did not emerge. While John Tate—the group’s undisputed leader—wants them all to keep calm, stay quiet, and figure out a plan amongst themselves, the sensitive Brian believes they should tell someone about Adam’s supposed death. It was, after all, an accident, and Brian is deeply upset and remorseful. While Brian wants to do what’s right and seek help, penance, and perhaps absolution, John Tate only wants to avoid punishment. Brian’s solution would be the more difficult (and dangerous) thing, and ultimately his peers declare loyalty to John Tate instead. They put their fate in his and Phil’s hands, going along with the usually quiet Phil’s intricate and detailed plan to obtain clothes from Adam’s house and taint them with a stranger’s DNA in order to suggest that Adam has been kidnapped. Though the path the group chooses is hard in its own way, it’s easier than facing up to the emotional and legal ramifications of what they’ve done. The teens’ predicament worsens when a postman matching the description they gave the police during a false statement is apprehended and questioned in connection to the crime. Leah and Lou are devastated at the idea that an innocent man could go to prison based on fake evidence the group themselves cooked up, but Phil threatens to kill Brian if he doesn’t go down to the station and positively identify the suspect. Again, the group decides to act in their own self-interest instead of doing what’s morally right—they take the easy way out, refusing again to own up to what they’ve done even as their plot involves more and more innocent lives.

The group’s second major chance for redemption arrives in the play’s third part, when Cathy and Brian find a boy with a terrible head wound living in the woods. The boy is dirty and incoherent and doesn’t remember his own name until the others call him Adam—it turns out that he is alive, after all. Brian—whose mental state has deteriorated markedly in the weeks since what the group believed was Adam’s death—is too strung out on psychiatric medications to make a moral argument for coming clean at last. Leah, on the other hand, begs Phil to end the charade and confess to the authorities—Adam is alive, and it’s only right to help him reclaim his place in society. Phil, however, ignores Leah’s pleas and sends Brian into the woods with a plastic bag to strangle Adam to death. In this scene, the group is presented with a second—and final—chance to redeem themselves. Even though Adam is clearly alive, alone, and in pain, the leaders of the group decide it would be too hard to extricate themselves from the situation. Many of their lives have become easier in the wake of Adam’s disappearance—there is more social cohesion at school, for example—and they are reluctant to do something difficult and potentially incriminating, even though it would be the morally right thing to do.

Dennis Kelly’s DNA is a short, cutting, and ultimately bleak work that paints a pessimistic, uninspiring picture of human morality. Kelly uses a group of scared, self-centered teens as a microcosm of humanity in order to suggest that even though one might like to believe that in a difficult situation they’d step up and do what’s right, it’s more likely that one would choose to take the easy way out—even if it results in one or several innocent individuals being harmed or wronged.