1
The formula for the well made play is so easy that I give
it for the benefit of any reader who feels tempted to try his
hand at making the fortune that awaits all manufacturers in this
line. First, you "have an idea" for a dramatic situation.
If it strikes you as a splendidly original idea, whilst it is
in fact as old as the hills, so much the better. For instance,
the situation of an innocent person convicted by circumstances
of a crime may always be depended on. If the person is a woman,
she must be convicted of adultery. If a young officer, he must
be convicted of selling information to the enemy, though it is
really a fascinating female spy who has ensnared him and stolen
the incriminating document. If the innocent wife, banished from
her home, suffers agonies through her separation from her children,
and, when one of them is dying (of any disease the dramatist
chooses to inflict), disguises herself as a nurse and attends
it through its dying convulsion until the doctor, who should
be a serio-comic character, and if possible a faithful old admirer
of the lady's, simultaneously announces the recovery of the child
and the discovery of the wife's innocence, the success of the
play may be regarded as assured if the writer has any sort of
knack for his work. Comedy is more difficult, because it requires
a sense of humor and a good deal of vivacity; but the process
is essentially the same: it is the manufacture of a misunderstanding.
Having manufactured it, you place its culmination at the end
of the last act but one, which is the point at which the manufacture
of the play begins. Then you make your first act out of the necessary
introduction of the characters to the audience, after elaborate
explanations, mostly conducted by servants, solicitors, and other
low life personages (the principals must all be dukes and colonels
and millionaires), of how the misunderstanding is going to come
about. Your last act consists, of course, of clearing up the
misunderstanding, and generally getting the audience out of the
theatre as best you can.
Now please do not misunderstand me as pretending that this
process is so mechanical that it offers no opportunity for the
exercise of talent. On the contrary, it is so mechanical that
without very conspicuous talent nobody can make much reputation
by doing it, though some can and do make a living at it. And
this often leads the cultivated classes to suppose that all plays
are written by authors of talent. As a matter of fact the majority
of those who in France and England make a living by writing plays
are unknown and, as to education, all but illiterate. Their names
are not worth putting on the playbill, because their audiences
neither know nor care who the author is, and often believe that
the actors improvise the whole piece, just as they in fact do
sometimes improvise the dialogue. To rise out of this obscurity
you must be a Scribe or a Sardou, doing essentially the same
thing, it is true, but doing it wittily and ingeniously, at moments
almost poetically, and giving the persons of the drama some touches
of real observed character...
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¹ This
essay was originally published by George
Bernard Shaw in his Preface to Three Plays by Brieux
(New York: Brentano's, 1911), pp. xxii-xxvii. |