Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

"What's the object of this entertainment?"

"The funds are to go to installing electric light in the church."

 

A pageant of English history is being performed as a benefit on the lawn of Pointz Hall. Miss La Trobe has written the texts and organized the actors. The Olivers--a new family in the village; they've only owned Pointz Hall for a hundred and twenty years--have offered their lawn, or the barn should it turn wet.

The pageant begins with a prologue; then there's an Elizabethan episode, a pastiche of a Restoration comedy, and finally the Present Day. The real story--that of the villagers--happens between the acts? So it would seem.

 

But it's also taking place on a June day in 1939, and is between the acts in another sense, act one and act two of the great world conflagration. That afternoon seems peaceful, nothing to worry about but the weather, but the play is interrupted by a droning aircraft and the failure of the gramophone to provide music; neither the girl who recites the prologue ("England am I") nor Queen Elizabeth ("Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco") are able to remember their lines. In the audience, Colonel Mayhew keeps wondering, "Where's the British army?" because, of course, you can't tell the history of England without the British army. The implication is it will return all too soon.

 

The confusion of the actors is mirrored in the confusion of the audience. That morning before the pageant, Bartholomew Oliver, patriarch of the Olivers, terrified his grandson George with a rolled-up newspaper, and the boy runs off crying; Bartholomew now thinks he's the grandfather of a crybaby. His son, Giles Oliver, a stockbroker in the city, is attracted to the overripe Mrs. Manresa; they go off alone to the greenhouse at one point. The introduction observes that Manresa is a generic name for a Jesuit novice house (from the town in Spain) but is also a near-homonym for man-raiser. Giles, who spotted a snake with a toad half-eaten and stuck in its mouth, walks around with blood on his shoe from stomping the pair to death. Isabella Oliver, Giles' wife, thinks of her husband as handsome and the father of her children, but is attracted to Rupert Haines, a gentleman farmer of the area; it leads to nothing. "It made no difference his infidelity--but hers did."

 

William Dodge, whose name people can't remember--"I'm William"--is a homosexual; he's disdained by the men, but Mrs. Swithin, old Bartholomew's widowed sister, shows him around Pointz Hall; Isa Oliver feels a near mute sympathy with him. Will the young crybaby George become William? Or will he become part of Britain's army? 

 

The pageant itself is poetical, but so is the text it's embedded in. Just on the first page, there are the following alliterations: 'the county council', 'gobble in the gutter', 'a cow coughed', 'substance and succulence', 'a swan swimming'. Woolf, as Miss La Trobe, gets to write the verse of the pageant, and the Restoration comedy, with its classism and Lady Harraden's failed plot to marry off her niece and keep the money in the family. But between the failure of the actors to remember their lines, the failure of the technical contraptions to work, and the failure of the audience to put aside their own distractions--and this before cell phones!--Miss La Trobe thinks:

"It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her."

This was Virginia Woolf's last novel before her suicide in March of 1941 and was published only after her death. Leonard says in a headnote that it was substantially completed, though it was likely Virginia would have made some changes when it was in proof.

I suppose nobody thinks this one of the greatest Woolf works, but I still thought it was very good. It's possible there's a little too much going on for something that's basically novella length? The Years was swift and spare in its telling; this even more so. The introduction in my edition, by Linden Peach, a professor at the University of Wales, suggests that Miss La Trobe's sense of failure mirrors Woolf's own at the time. Maybe, but I think that a sense of failure is inherent in the attempt to create; it never completely goes away, and even the chronically depressed Woolf knew this. Miss La Trobe also thinks:

"Hadn't she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was a relief from agony..."

That could be the most we can hope for.