Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

A Playwright’s Progress 91
supreme if not sole virtues. The well-made play is defined by an aesthetic
of obsessive tidiness. 1 The well-made play is always about keeping the lid
on things, about keeping drawers closed and doors locked. Its most notorious
feature was the substitution of the logic of economy for that of natural
probability and human psychology. Nothing must be introduced that is
not used. If a gun is exhibited, Chekhov said, it must be fired (Magarshack
45). There is nothing whatever wrong with a dramatist’s introducing a gun
early which is used later; the fault lies with an aesthetic that accepts such a
sequence as logical causation in lieu of real psychology and natural probability.
If there were no better reason for Hedda Gabler’s suicide than the
fact that one of the two dueling pistols introduced in the first act had not
yet been fired, no one would have heard of Ibsen’s play today. As it is, the
assertion that Ibsen’s handling of the dueling pistols was a trick borrowed
from the well-made play is nearly as insignificant as true.
The aesthetic of the well-made play is introduced in the plays of both
Ibsen and Shaw only to be subverted. Shaw strongly objected to plays that
were “constructed.” His preference for an organic development based on
human psychology was not just a function of his superior aesthetic sense;
the artificial, fabricated quality of the well-made play was essential to its
viewpoint, a view of the world directly counter to the one Shaw wished to
present. The point of the well-made play is not that it is without human
psychology and passion but that the passion is controlled, wrapped up, and
contained. It was deliberately dishonest. The well-made play is the perfect
expression of the repressed psychology of bourgeois respectability. It titillates
the audience by first exposing its secret lusts and repressed terrors
and then tightly locking them up again. The scaffolding of dramatic construction
was always visible, not because the playwrights were inept (as it
seems to us) but to reassure the audience: the bottle is always there so that
the genie of lust and disorder may be made to return to it. The well-made
play is like a magician’s box with many doors and sliding panels; what it
contains is titillating and terrifying. The magician-playwright shows
glimpses of the seductive monster within, even letting it appear to escape
from time to time, but always locks it up tightly in the end. This is why
dramatists like Ibsen and Shaw were so furiously opposed to the wellmade
play: it satisfied its audience exactly to the degree that it evaded
those problems which Shaw and Ibsen wished honestly to confront.
Ibsen uses the well-made play more distinctively than Shaw. He shows
us the box and all of its doors and reveals the monster within, but instead
of locking it up, he finally opens it all up and lets the ogre out. The dramatic