Between Acts

On a June day in 1939, the Oliver family estate gathers its household members and villagers, unexpected guests arrive, and the performance for which everyone has assembled begins. On the amateur stage, episodes from England’s history from the Middle Ages to the onset of war are played out. However, the performance is interrupted by long pauses, rearranging of decorations and changes of costumes, struggles with a stubborn gramophone and a downpour, and it is then that the audience becomes the heroes of the novel: they talk and drink tea, experience minor quarrels and major dramas, and search for themselves in a world that is crumbling before their eyes. The theatrical and the real, the past and the present, distant history and the eve of a new era intertwine in this lyrical and ironic novel, which became the last act in the work of Virginia Woolf…