The contexts of DNA: Dennis Kelly's route into theatre, the National Theatre's Connections scheme that commissioned the play for young performers, and its first productions,
early 21st-century fears about feral teenagers, gangs and hoodies, the fear of terrorism behind Kelly's question about sacrificing one person for the many, and stories of children without adults such as Lord of the Flies.
How context works in the comparison question: the situations the two extracts show, rather than background about the play.
Dennis Kelly: brought up in Barnet in north London, he left school at 16, worked in a market and a supermarket, found theatre through an amateur group, studied drama at Goldsmiths and only began writing seriously at 31; his first play, Debris, opened in 2003.
His later work, from Matilda the Musical, which won him a Tony award, to the television series Pulling and Utopia, and his liking for plays built round a moral question he cannot answer: 'a play can ask a question and not know the answer'.
The National Theatre's Connections scheme, which commissions new plays for young people to perform: DNA was written for it, staged by youth theatres at its festival in 2007 and given a professional production at the National Theatre's Cottesloe in 2008, then toured by Hull Truck in 2012 and revived by the National Youth Theatre in the West End in 2016.
What Kelly says set him writing: the fear of terrorism and of over-reacting to it, which led him to ask 'whether it was right to sacrifice the individual for the many' and 'how many wrong things you can do for a greater purpose'; for him the play is 'not about bullying', since the real bullying happens before it starts.
Fears about teenagers in the 2000s: tabloid scares about ASBOs, feral gangs and hoodies, and David Cameron mocked in 2006 for suggesting we 'hug a hoodie', fears the play pushes to such blackly comic extremes that they look like a media invention.
Stories of children left to themselves, from Lord of the Flies to The Hunger Games, which usually end with adults back in control; DNA has no adults at all and offers no such comfort.
A play set nowhere in particular, with no mobile phones, whose cast list says that 'names and genders are suggestions only', so that the characters' choices matter more than who they are.
Context in the comparison question: what the two extracts and their introductions suggest about the characters' situations, such as age, gender, class and family or friendship ties, rather than the play's background.
In OCR's exam, this background earns no marks of its own: part (a) credits the context you can infer from the two printed extracts and their introductions, and part (b) doesn't mark context. Know it to understand the text, and use it in an answer only where it explains a reading.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
