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Act 5, Scene 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Oliver waits for James to show up in the dressing room, but he never does. As he walks back to the wings, he meets Meredith and kisses her. He tells her that her beauty scares him sometimes, and she blushes. He asks her where she’d been the previous night, and she promises to tell him later. As they part, Oliver calls out to her and tells her not to kiss James like she did in Gwendolyn’s class again. Angry, Meredith asks him, “Who is it that you’re jealous of? Him or me?”
Although Oliver’s swift action to hide the evidence of James’s guilt suggested that he had “chosen” James’s side in a significant way, he still seems to be in the middle of James and Meredith when it comes to love. Meredith highlights this with her question, and Oliver’s lack of response implies that he may indeed be jealous of Meredith instead of James.
Themes
With fifteen minutes left before he has to be on stage, Oliver grabs James in the wings and drags him outside. He tells him that he’s found the boat hook and begs him to say that he didn’t kill Richard. James tells him it was an accident, but Oliver staggers back and puts distance between them. As the stars shine above, Oliver asks James to tell him what happened. James tells him that after Richard threw Wren across the yard on the night of the Julius Caesar cast party, Wren tearfully asked James to go after him and make sure he was okay. James knew this was a stupid idea, but he went anyway.
The stars shining overhead establish this evening as another important one in the story, and rightfully so; James’s explanation has been a long time coming, and Meredith is still hiding some mysterious secret. The fact that James went after Richard when Wren asked him to confirms his dedication to her, but it also implies that the close bond between the two of them after Richard’s death might have had more to do with their shared secret than with romantic connection.
Themes
James looked for Richard in the forest, only to realize that Richard had been stalking him through the woods the whole time. James urged Richard to come back with him and make amends with Wren and Meredith, but Richard refused and started to push and taunt James. When James tried to invoke Wren and Meredith to calm him down again, Richard asked him, “Why can’t you and Oliver just admit you’re queer for each other and leave my girls alone?” James tried to leave, but Richard threw him through the boathouse doors. He picked up the hook, and Richard started to laugh and push him to the end of the dock, daring him to use the hook. Scared and angry, James finally hit him with it.
As Richard’s behavior on Halloween hinted, possessive anger over “his girls” appears to have been a major factor in his blind rage—he felt entitled to Meredith and Wren. He uses a homophobic slur in his jab at James, the very first time that anyone in the story has explicitly acknowledged the possibility that Oliver or James is gay in such clear terms. The words seem to shake James, implying that he really might be gay, in love with Oliver, and closeted. The threat of exposure and the threat of death in the same place where Richard nearly killed James on Halloween are what drive James to kill Richard. It’s an act of self-defense.
Themes
Richard fell into the water, and James assumed that he was dead. He fled back into the forest and encountered Filippa. She stayed calm and burned his bloody clothes while he showered and vomited. He was too afraid to tell Oliver what he’d done when he saw him in the bathroom that night, thinking that he’d look at him differently. James finishes his story and looks at Oliver with tears in his eyes. Oliver tells him that things will be okay and leads him back into the FAB. Briefly, Oliver thinks that they really might be.
Filippa knew that James killed Richard all along, but Oliver never suspected a thing. Like her typecast, Filippa is slippery and hard to pin down, and it’s easy to underestimate her. It’s now clear that James was throwing up and showering in the bathroom that night to rinse Richard’s blood away. Both Richard’s slur and his own crime must have been very fresh in his mind, which explains his self-conscious misery and awareness of Oliver that night.
Themes
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