Between the Acts

Published posthumously by Hogarth Press shortly after Wooolf’s suicide, Between The Acts was her last novel and, strangely perhaps, closest to the first. It takes place over a day before, during and after the staging of an amateur pageant in an English village just before the onset of the Second World War. Unlike her major fictional works, Between The Acts is dialogue driven, rather than introspective, and there is also an omniscient sense to it, as though Woolf is directing the characters much as they would later be directed in the pageant. The play itself takes place in three scenes disconnected by years of history leading from a Shakespearian romance, onto a Restoration comedy and finally a triumphant Victorian parade in a notional Hyde Park.