Between the Acts

In June 1939, the residents of Pointz Hall and their neighbours gather for an annual village pageant written and directed by Miss La Trobe. Scenes from English history are performed among private quarrels, frustrated desires, class tensions and interruptions from weather, animals and machinery. As Europe approaches war, the pageant’s broken version of the national past exposes the uncertainty beneath ideas of English continuity and community. Woolf’s final novel combines country-house society, amateur theatre and political unease to portray rural England at the end of the interwar period.