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Summary
Act 4, Scenes 7–10 and Act 5, Prologue and Scenes 1–2
Act 4, Scene 7
Oliver sleeps for a long time and, when he wakes up, Filippa is sitting on Meredith’s bed. They discuss James’s absence from class, and she urges Oliver to talk to him. When Oliver sees him, he starts yelling, saying how angry he is or should be. Oliver seems on the cusp of expressing his feelings but instead asks James how he is. James replies that he wants to hurt the whole world and then places his palm on Oliver’s chest.
Act 4, Scene 8
Filippa, James, Oliver, Wren, and Meredith are working quietly when Colin enters, looking for Alexander. Colin realizes something is wrong, and they rush to break into Alexander’s room where they find him on the floor, empty pill bottles everywhere. He’s still alive. The group hurries to save his life. Oliver calls an ambulance and, after he hangs up, runs into the woods to scream.
Act 4, Scene 9
Only four of the six are in class, and they are each required to talk to a counselor. Their rehearsals are tepid, and Gwendolyn complains about the lack of passion between James and Meredith, whose characters kiss in King Lear. Gwendolyn acknowledges they dislike one another but encourages them to imagine what hate sex would feel like. As they rehearse the scene, which culminates in a savage kiss, Oliver feels incredibly anxious.
Act 4, Scene 10
Oliver escapes to Frederick’s classroom, where the teacher offers him a cup of tea. The other students are either late or in the infirmary. When Frederick gives him the cup, Oliver drops it, and the cup shatters.
Prologue
Colborne and Oliver visit the room he once shared with James. Colborne asks Oliver to explain their relationship, and Oliver admits it’s hard to do. He liked James, in part, because James was everything he wasn’t and thinks James liked him because he was naïve and ordinary. They were friends, enamored of one another, and maybe more. Oliver admits, in closing, that he never quite figured out what they were.
Act 5, Scene 1
The set design for King Lear is a mirrored floor reflecting the thousands of lights above. The group cautiously walks onto it. Over the course of the semester, they have become increasingly isolated. Alexander is back, suffering from symptoms of withdrawal but carefully supervised by Colin and Filippa, Wren stays in her room, and Oliver sleeps sometimes with Meredith, sometimes in the room with James. Oliver regularly dreams about Richard, as well as Meredith and James.
Act 5, Scene 2
King Lear is a success. The group throws an obligatory cast party, although none of them feel festive. The party is lifeless, and James isn’t there. Oliver finds Meredith in the garden, and she says there’s something she needs to discuss but, crying gently, postpones the conversation. After Meredith goes inside, Oliver finds James in the library. They converse in lines from King Lear, and Oliver is frightened by James’s manipulation of the text and drunken demeanor. As James rushes off, he knocks a candle over, lighting some books on fire. Oliver is putting it out when Filippa comes in, searching for vodka. They decide that the drinking should end because the night is scaring them. Filippa warns Oliver to be careful of James, who they both agree seems unhinged. Oliver finds James by a broken mirror. James pushes Oliver away and begs him to stop following, though Oliver does not. James turns to Wren and asks her to come to bed with him, and she agrees. Meredith is missing.
Analysis
Act 4 ends with Oliver saying that their drama was on the cusp of its climax. Although much has happened since Richard’s death—Wren’s collapse, Alexander’s overdose, James’s attack of Oliver, and the discovery of physical evidence—Oliver’s feeling that the end is near is precipitated by the violent kiss that Gwendolyn’s coaching encourages between James and Meredith. Like hate sex, it comes from a place of cruelty and dislike rather than tenderness and respect and it fills Oliver with revulsion. If these two people, who are not fond of one another could come together, then all principles that shape his world, as well his sexual desire, are upended. In breaking the teacup, Oliver literalizes his overarching sense that everything is broken beyond repair. He is not the only person in the novel who feels this way. When James smashes the bathroom mirror, it is surely a sign that he cannot bear to look at himself, another way of indicating that their world is coming undone. In terms of five-act dramatic structure, it might be more accurate to say that this corresponds to falling-action rather than the climax itself.
Because the novel is set in an academic setting, a certain degree of repetition is guaranteed, as one semester follows another. This is exacerbated in If We Were Villains by the rehearsals and performances, both kinds of repetition, of the plays. Still, when it comes time to repeat the cast party, the characters respond with pronounced discomfort. Oliver and Filippa both are eager to prevent the party from spiraling out of control, as had the cast party for Julius Caesar. At the same time, however, this event provides the resolution to what happened at the previous one. Meredith tearfully tells Oliver she has news to share but decides she cannot. Readers will later learn that she has found out that James caused the injuries to Richard and has decided to take this information to the police. Her absence that night, unexplained in time of the novel, is one that ends their private drama.
But the more important repetition in this section occurs when Alexander overdoses. For a second time in the novel, the group comes upon a classmate splayed and seemingly broken. Richard had seemed to have broken wings and Alexander appears to have a broken neck. As before, he seems to be dead but is actually alive. Yet, where they froze at the sight of Richard, now the group springs into action. Oliver calls 911 and Alexander survives. As he had on the dock, James rejects those objections (here, sending the drugs to the ER with Alexander) that would make it less likely he would survive. The overdose is an indication of guilt’s effects on Alexander, but it also repeats the prior event with a different outcome. The repetition draws attention again to the moral questions that Richard’s death raised, specifically those about why it seemed like the better course of action to the group. Reintroducing the question closer to the story’s resolution suggests a reexamination of the relationship between responsibility and complicity.
Early in the novel, when the group lists the features of tragedy, Meredith volunteers that they have conflicts that play out internally and externally. In this part of If We Were Villains, this structural feature of tragedy is made explicit. On the one hand, the characters are all suffering the private strain of their morally suspect decision to allow their colleague to die and prove increasingly unable to manage the stress. At the same time, the tensions generated by the knowledge that the police don't believe them creates the conditions for conflict. The group tries to act in concert against these external forces, but they are weakened by the lack of a clear leader (although they should have chosen Filippa, their Lady Macbeth) and their internal struggles.
