ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf wrote almost exclusively for pages rather than stages, and her fiction fosters and depends upon conditions of solitary, absorptive reading. But she also wrote ardently of theatrical audiences, and it would be hard to find a book that more vividly evokes collective reception than her final work Between the Acts. My fourth chapter approaches this complex theatre-novel through a consideration of Woolf’s career-long critical and fictional engagement with theatre and drama, casting the author as a paradoxical combination of what Martin Puchner calls “modernist anti-theatricalism” and what David Kurnick terms “interiority’s discontents.” To consider the novel’s investment in theatrical co-presence is also to emphasize what many critics of Between the Acts have underplayed—the extent to which its engagement with theatre pushes beyond the human. The novel’s gaze is repeatedly drawn to the countless “stage properties” participating in Miss La Trobe’s countryside pageant, as well as the particularities of the environment with which it interacts. I argue that Woolf’s progressive upstaging of what had long been theatre’s essential feature—the human being—both links her with key thrusts in modern drama and anticipates recent movements towards “theatre ecology.”
