Well-made play

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The well-made play (from the French: pièce bien faite) is a form of drama developed in the nineteenth century and associated especially with the French playwright Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), and later "perfected" by his follower Victorien Sardou.

The term gives to a variety of plays written since about 1825 which combine in a seemingly logical and plausible structure the following features: Frequently, the hero experiences a conflict between love (for a naive girl he wishes to marry) and duty (to an older and more worldly woman from whom he wishes to disengage himself without embarrassment). This, of course, is an updated version of the conflict which was basic to so much neoclassical tragedy. Most of the other features of the well-made play can similarly be traced to earlier forms.

There are six points to the well-made play:

The plot is based upon a withheld secret, known only to some of the characters, usually about the play's hero, the revelation of which provides the turning point of the play.

Initial exposition provides information, usually by means of question and answer, about the events that precede the start of the play (antecedent action) and both leads toward the secret and withholds it.

Ups and Downs are generally seen in dialogue, exchanges of wit between opponents, in which we move closer to the revelation of the secret.

Reversal, followed by a revelatory scene (the French critic Francisque Sarcey called this the scéne à faire) in which we and the characters in the play learn the secret, often for the first time.

A plausible dénouement is designed to make everything that has occurred believable.

The key to the whole play is that each act or scene repeats this pattern.

The majority of well-made plays are comedies, often farce. In his book The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Bernard Shaw proposed that Ibsen converted this formula for use in "serious" plays by substituting discussion for the plausible dénouement or conclusion. Thus, plays become open ended, as if there were life beyond the last act curtain.

1 Crisis
2 Hero
3 Unities
4 Examples of a Well-Made Play

[edit] Crisis

In a well-made play the crisis refers to the moment of a play when all the relevant information about the main story or theme has been gathered in and when the audience can guess what the outcome will be. It is the moment before the dénouement when the audience realizes for the first time when the unraveling will start and what its outcome is likely to be.

[edit] Hero

The hero in a well-made play is someone better than average, but usually someone with a flaw to his character which circumstances exploited. The flaws bring about the hero's destruction, but because he is better than average, the audience will identify with him thus feeling the full force of their downfalls. Empathy leads to a release of emotions, the purgation or catharsis of feelings.

[edit] Unities

The unities were intended to provide plays with logical and acceptable forms, but were intolerably limiting. In a well-made play the unity of time meant that the fictional time span might correspond to a day, or a weekend, or a month. The unity of place meant that the setting of the story should stay consistent throughout the story. The unity of action meant that all events should lead eventually to the crisis.