The Well Made Play

How one man tried to catalog what makes tales work, and how his work was lost.

The Flower of Europe

The culture of Europe reached its peak in the end of the 19th century. Paris was its cultural center where the theater reigned supreme. Bourgeois life in its first flowering of the Modern World made a glittering, beautiful trap.

Sarcey

Francisque Sarcey was a playwright (once only), teacher, and most famously a drama critic for some newspapers of fueilletons for over 40 years, from 1860 to the century’s end.

He loved the theater and claimed no special intellectual gift; he said he represented the average bourgeois theater-goer, ‘the one who pays.’ But he had a clear intellect and common sense, and the optimism of his age. Over the thousands of reviews he wrote, Sarcey helped to mark out and popularize the notion of the ‘well-made play’ or pièce bien faite — the idea of the play as a bit of magic (or clock-making) that worked in certain predictable and sure ways on its audience.

His favorites among dramatists were Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou.

One thing we must note before we go on: this was a small world and its tastes fell into a small sphere. The readers of magazines and newspapers who flocked to the theater were bourgeois Parisians who shared values, tastes, dreams and aspirations of Modern Society. And the fact that a play is viewed in public, en masse, means that it must appeal to men and women, young and old, rich and poor, all at the same moments. This further served to make the popular trends in theater uniform, even as popular movies today seem to repeat the same situations again and again. There was, for example, a preference for comedy and the happy ending, the heroes were themselves bourgeois, the family figured prominently, and the goals included social acceptance and advancement, wealth, and keeping up appearances even when the wealth was lacking. Clever twists and turns of the plot were lauded over depth of character, and as Sarcey proclaimed himself no more nor less than an average bourgeois himself, we cannot look for any other point of view from him.

All the same, he was a genius in his way.

End of the Age

History turned, and the great Belle Époque came to an end. In the second decade of the 20th century, Europe destroyed itself; there followed the end of empires and the loss of wealth from colonies, and one more round of suicidal destruction two decades later. The happy, smug theater Sarcey loved began to fail even before the first World War; young intellectuals scorned the bourgeois life that they had been born into, and moved beyond the clockwork plays of their grandparents. In the meantime movies began to draw off the masses of viewers.

Sarcey, because he wrote for ephemeral press, and because the type of theater he championed, fell wholly out of favor, was at first disdained, then parodied and ridiculed (notably by George Bernard Shaw), and at last forgotten.

His best reviews were bound in Quarante Ans du Theâtre in 1902, shortly after his death. He also wrote a Theory of the Theater, which was translated into English with comments by noted American critic Brander Matthews.

Hope Against Hope

I have long looked on Sarcey’s model as a sort of Lost Ark of the Covenant of talesmanship, that might make me a great talesman if I could but fathom all his clues, recipes, and instructions. It is a vain hope, I’m sure.

William Gillette wrote on this general notion in his Introduction to How to Write a Play, a collection of letters written by the great French playwrights of that glittering age edited by Brander Matthews:

There are no workable rules for play-writing to be found here—nor, indeed, any particular light of any kind on the subject, so the letters may be approacht with a mind arranged for enjoyment. I would be sorry indeed for the trying-to-be dramatist who flew to this volume for consolation and guidance. I’m sorry for him any way, but this additional catastrophe would accelerate my sympathy, making it fast and furious. Any one sufficiently inexperienced to consult books in order to find out how to write a play will certainly undergo a severe touch of confusion in this case, for four of the letter-writers confess quite frankly that they do not know—two of these thereupon proceeding to tell us, thus forcibly illustrating their first statement. One author exclaims, “Have instinct!”—another, “Have genius!” Where these two necessaries are to be obtained is not revealed. Equally discouraging is the Dumas declaration that “Some from birth know how to write a play and the others do not and never will.” That would have killed off a lot of us—if we had seen it in time.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, March 23, 2008)