Well-Made Play

The well-made play, in French la piece bien faite, is a nineteenth-century dramatic genre developed by the French playwright Eugene Scribe, characterized by concise plotting, a compelling narrative and a largely standardized structure, with comparatively little emphasis on characterization or intellectual ideas. Scribe wrote several hundred plays between 1815 and 1861, often with co-authors, and his formula broke from the neoclassical style of the Comedie Francaise to appeal to the theatre-going middle classes. Later playwrights who drew on the formula included Alexandre Dumas fils, Victorien Sardou and Georges Feydeau in France, W. S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward and Alan Ayckbourn in Britain, and Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller in the United States, while Henrik Ibsen and Bernard Shaw adapted it even as they objected to its constraints.