Well-Made Play

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Well-Made Play is a genre of theatre from the 19th century, codified by Eugène Scribe and taken further by Zola arguing that plays could construct accurate models of life, for the purpose of analysing the 'cause and effect' of human behavior.^[1] It has a strong neoclassical flavor, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition. Following that would be a series of causally related plot complications. One of the hallmarks of the Well-Made Play is the use of letters or papers falling into unintended hands in order to bring about plot twists and climaxes. Following the recommendations found in Aristotle's Poetics, the letters must bring about an unexpected reversal of fortune, in which it is often revealed that someone is not who he/she pretends to be. The reversal will allow for a quick denouement, and a return to order, at which point the curtain falls.

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest exaggerates many of the conventions of the well-made play, such as the missing papers conceit (the hero, as an infant, was confused with the manuscript of a novel) and a final revelation (which, in this play, occurs about thirty seconds before the final curtain).

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House follows most of the conceits of the well-made play, but transcends the genre when, after incriminating papers are recovered, Nora (rather shockingly) rejects the expected return to normality. Several of Ibsen's subsequent plays seem to build on the general construction principles of the Well-Made Play. The Wild Duck (1884) can be seen as a deliberate, meta-theatrical deconstruction of the Scribean formula. Ibsen sought a compromise between Naturalism and the Well-Made Play which was fraught with difficulties since life does not fall easily into the syllogistic of either form^[2]

Although George Bernard Shaw scorned the "well-made play" and claimed to create works which attempted to defy its conventions^{[citation needed]}, he accepted them and even thrived by them for by necessity they concentrated his skills on the conversation between characters, his greatest asset as a dramatist.^[3] Other classic twists on the well-made play can be seen in his use of the General's coat and the hidden photograph in "Arms and the Man".

Also, J. B. Priestley's 1946 'An Inspector Calls' may in some ways be considered a "well-made play" in that its action happens before the play starts, and in the case of the older Birlings no moral change takes place. The similarity between Priestley's play and this rather conservative genre might strike some readers/audiences as surprising because Priestley was a socialist. However, his play, like Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' transcends this genre by providing another plunge into chaos after the return to normality. He replaced the dramatic full stop with a question mark by revealing in the last scene that the 'inspector' who has exposed the complicity of a prosperous industrial family in the murder/suicide of a working-class girl, is not an inspector at all (perhaps a practical joker, an emanation of the world to come, or a manifestation of the world to come), and the curtain falls on the news that a real girl has died and a real inspector is on the way.^[4]

[edit] References and footnotes