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Summary
Act 2, Scenes 6–10
Act 2, Scene 6
During a sold-out opening night for Julius Caesar, Richard smashes Oliver’s ear in the assassination scene fight. Knowing his abuse is purposeful, Alexander, James, and Oliver decide that the next night, if he hurts one of them during the scene, they will beat him. They signal their assent with lines from the play.
Act 2, Scene 7
Despite the show’s success, the potential fight with Richard distracts Oliver throughout the following day. During the performance, the tension between the actors is palpable. In the assassination scene, Richard makes the first move, crushing Oliver’s neck. Bedlam erupts on stage, and Filippa is thrown, breathless, to the ground, causing her to miss a line. Richard’s rage is palpable, even as he lies pretending to be dead.
Act 2, Scene 8
During the afterparty as they smoke a spliff, the group discusses their performances and their injuries. Colin, a third-year student, tells them that Richard is upstairs, drinking whiskey. Meredith is in the garden, flirting with a cellist. Oliver tells Wren that Richard has been beating them up on stage, and she admits Richard sometimes frightens her. Oliver runs into James, who has been upstairs reading. They hear a commotion outside. Richard has beaten the cellist, who is rushed to the infirmary. Richard rages, and Meredith demands he stop bullying them. He calls her a slut, and she hits him. A mêlée ensues as the men try to protect Meredith from Richard’s rage. Meredith storms off and Oliver follows her. They kiss passionately on the stairs before absconding to her room where they have sex while Richard pounds on the door, threatening to kill them.
Act 2, Scene 9
Oliver wakes in Meredith’s room and goes to the bathroom. There he finds James, sick in the bathroom from excess drinking. Oliver learns a first-year saw Meredith and him kissing and told everyone at the party about it. A worried Oliver asks about Richard. James says he believes that Richard went to the woods. Tensions mount when Oliver tells James that Meredith isn’t just a one-night stand.
Act 2, Scene 10
Oliver wakes to Filippa’s knocking on the door. She tells them both to dress and join her on the dock. When they arrive, they find everyone else is already there, staring at Richard, his face crushed and bloody, floating in the water. Their silence is broken when he groans and reaches for them. With horror, James exclaims that he is alive.
Analysis
The novel’s theory of acting holds that the actor’s emotions are integral to the successful performance of a play. When Alexander, James, and Oliver decide to use a scene from Julius Caesar to address their real-life problem with Richard, they invert this paradigm, suggesting a basic confusion about the relationship between art and life. Richard also displays this confusion, and it is encouraged by their teachers. But, in making their plan and using Shakespeare’s language to assent to it, the others fall victim to the illusions they create as actors. The three reach the decision to attack Richard on stage collaboratively, although it is James who insists they not involve their teachers, the obvious course of action given how battered and bruised they all are. Here one can see a hint of the split in James’s personality, the internal struggles that will play an integral role in Richard’s death.
The conflation of character and role is enhanced by a minor formal feature of the novel. When its presentation shifts from prose to dialogue, the name of the “character” who speaks the lines is the character from the novel, not the one from the play. In a printed play, the convention is to list the characters. Even though this is a minor alteration, it reduces the distances between the two kinds of characters and that is especially important in the final performance of Julius Caesar. Richard and Caesar become indistinguishable as the assassination scene is transformed from a performance into a planned attack, the deposition of someone who tyrannizes their group. The tension is palpable as the staged drama unfolds and Richard’s violent reaction not only injures Filippa but unsettles the play when others must read her lines. They make their way back to script but Oliver notices that Richard, feigning death, seethes with anger.
The cast party erupts into violence in the garden, an explicit inversion of the role that the natural world often plays in Shakespeare’s comedies. What the scene that ensues suggests, in other words, is that the year of tragedy is one that will happen both on and off stage. That the group hopes for a return to the more-contained distress of comedy is evident in Act 2, Scene 8, when James uses a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy, and Meredith one from Cymbeline—a play modern critics usually call a comedy, although it was originally understood to be a tragedy. But Richard’s rage, his fatal flaw, prevents the drama that unfolds from reaching a happy end. He beats the cellist who flirts with Meredith, calls Meredith a slut, and, later, when she and Oliver have retreated to her room, pounds on the door and screams violent threats.
The final two scenes of the act pull Oliver from the dream world that he and Meredith have created into reality. When he first ventures out of her room, he meets James in the bathroom. Their conversation is tense, but its most important moment is when Oliver tells his friend that he has vomit on his face, a physical trace of the anger and rage that runs through the group. The next time he leaves, he and Meredith are responding to Filippa’s summons to the dock. There they find Richard, floating in the water, seemingly dead. Both are encounters with something vile that force the group to face reality, rather than fantasy or dream. When it turns out that Richard is not dead, their reality turns into a nightmare.
