Between the Acts and Louis Napoleon Parker - the Creator of the Modern English Pageant'

Between the Acts is one of Virginia Woolf 's most political novels.2 Once attacked for 'its extraordinary vacancy and pointlessness' and its lack of concern for 'an external world',3 it is now generally understood to be a deeply felt response to fascism, patriarchy and the coming of the Second World War.4 However, while the book's feminist and pacifist themes are well explored, its central motif, a village pageant, is not well understood in terms of its historical context. Critics have tended to regard it in terms of tradition. Alex Zwerdling regards the pageant as a symbol of pre-war English society. 'The traditional village pageant' he writes, 'is juxtaposed against a very untraditional tension and nervous expectancy in many of its characters'.5 For Karen Schneider, this choice of 'the traditional English pageant' is evocative of 'the pastoral tradition'.6 Other critics have seen connections with older theatre forms. Woolf 's pageant has been interpreted as a metaphor of Greek drama, or in relation to the Elizabethan playhouse, in which the author explored the possibility of a new artistic community and its political implications.7 Insightful as all these interpretations are, they leave one view of the pageant intact that the villagers in Between the Acts are, at least ostensibly, participating in traditional community theatre. In fact, the pageant in Woolf 's time was not a traditional theatre form, and Woolf must have been aware of it. The subject of the action in Between the Acts was a contemporary and highly political form of theatre that had been 'invented' less than four decades before. It started in 1905, in Sherborne, Dorset, when Louis Napoleon Parker (1852-1944) directed the first modern pageant and seized the popular imagination. The Sherborne Pageant was originally planned to involve about a hundred people, but expanded to involve about nine hundred. Robert Withington, a contemporary of Woolf, describes the situation dramatically in his historical survey of English