Between the Acts

"Yes. And in fact Woolf is using the image of a village pageant in Between the Acts – she’s narrating it, she’s commenting on it – to serve the same kind of purpose as Kennedy’s plays and Kennedy’s essays, which so often involve the process by which she explores another literary or historical text, rewrites it, and then, paragraphs or scenes later, might rewrite it in another way. So there’s also this kind of intertextuality in her work. And you actually do find that very lyric elegiac form of fictional intertextuality in Between the Acts , with the way that nature functions in the narrative as a whole, as well as for each character, and the way it enters the play. The characters are always murmuring little bits of poetry and song, and in the play nature is brought in by this sweetly – and very deliberately – amateurish literary poetry. As is literary England’s collective cultural tradition, a tradition that includes the minor and the anonymous as well as the major. The characters are all moving between themselves as part of a collective past, a fraught present and a future that’s very frightening. And while they are themselves ostensibly real characters (novel-real characters) they also find themselves merging with the figures and forces of the play. There’s almost a touch of the allegorical. When I was re-reading it, I realised the characters are interesting, they’re poignant, they’re touching, but it’s about the larger purpose that they serve. Woolf’s language keeps moving us that way. Exactly. The narrator says love, hate, peace are the three emotions at the very end. You move from the pageant’s end, with people having to look at themselves in mirror fragments and then go their separate ways, to Miss La Trobe, the playwright, drinking alone and having a vision of what her next work will be. And her beginning becomes the book’s ending, when Isa and Giles are speaking. And again, those last words move into the elemental: “Then the curtain rose. They spoke.” It’s not generally the novel of hers that is taught. I think I started reading Woolf when I was in college in the mid 60s. So few women were taught. I was focusing on poetry but I would be very surprised if any or most of the professors teaching the modern English novel taught Between the Acts . They may have taught Woolf but they probably would have taught Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse . And I forget how I stumbled upon Mrs Dalloway… . I think I was just reading literary criticism and trying to catch up on a lot of prose. I was 21 or so. I loved it. So, I really just started reading her. As I moved into criticism, of course her essays were important to me. I think I was reading in order, so I would have come upon Between the Acts last but that still would have been some time in the 70s, and probably I loved it because of my love of theatre – and also perhaps because of an interest I wasn’t even fully aware of in these hybrid forms within a text. “The characters are all moving between themselves as part of a collective past, a fraught present and a future that’s very frightening” I also liked the idea that this book wasn’t what everybody loved of hers, that it was ostensibly unfinished and yet so profoundly moving. It’s always very moving when a writer’s life is ending and yet you can see in the last work that, yes, she/he is trying for something different, something new – yes, there was growth there. That’s exactly right, and each character’s reaction bounces off that. It’s as if we’re all in some kind of art gallery or museum walking through literature and art and cultural history, and we’re responding, pulling back or embracing, talking to ourselves, and being a little embarrassed at what our feelings are. So, there’s also this sense of the audience as spectators both in a life – in a village, at a pageant – and also in a common cultural or historical museum. I like that. I think it’s true. I would only add that the writer has to keep turning the mirror back on him or herself."

"Yes, there’s a split over whether it was finished or not. She never did her final revise of it, and often she did do quite a lot of work in that act of revision. But it doesn’t read like something unfinished. It’s very, very accomplished, and one of my favourite of Woolf’s books. It takes place at a village pageant in the summer preceding World War Two. I read it as a teenager and was so obsessed with it. I remember getting into an argument with a literature professor at an interview for a university that I very much got rejected from. It was so weird. We both loved Virginia Woolf, but both had very different visions of what that book was. I was young, so sure! I was the naïve one, more likely to be wrong but, at the same time, I remember this man puffing out—because I disagreed with him. What I was making the case for—and what I still agree with—is how obsessed that book is with the idea of individualism versus society, the exhausting nature of being one person whilst also being so recognisably within the midst of a group, connected to other people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I remember him being like, ‘it’s about the war!’ And I was like, I get that it’s about the war, but it’s also about these other things. We just couldn’t connect. I mean, it is about the war, to be fair—so much of it is about the burden of retrospect. It’s just before the war arrives, but they know the war is coming. Another war’s happened already. And so everything’s laced with this very aggressive, violent imagery. There’s something simmering. It’s all about living in what seems a simple present tense that’s about to combust into historical significance. So there’s this village pageant, and there are loads of silly characters who obsess with their hats and all these stupid everyday societal hang-ups. And they sit in an audience and watch a play. So this play comes into the text and you read the script as it’s being performed and get the audience’s reaction. We see the different levels of performance, and how existing in society is, on one level, feeling watched and scrutinised."