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).

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.

The three key features of the well-made play are the Crisis, the Hero, and the Unities.

[edit] Crisis

In a well-made play the crisis refers not to the unraveling of the plot, but in 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 realises fir 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.