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Act 5, Scene 6
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
Walton ushers Oliver into a police car as everybody watches. His friends look at him with despair and confusion. At the police station, Oliver takes full blame and tells them James’s story with himself in James’s place. He tells Colborne about the locker with the fabric and hook, both of which are now covered in his fingerprints. Despite the evidence and Oliver’s confession, he can tell that Colborne doesn’t quite believe him. Alexander and Filippa visit him in jail before his trial and ask him why he took the blame. He tells them that he wanted to change the ending of the tragedy: he wanted to save Romeo.
In taking the fall for James, Oliver has finally become the tragic hero that he longed to be at the start of term. But he still thinks of James as the hero in his own mind, considering him a Romeo—and, after all, life is more complicated than theatre, and there’s room for more than one hero. Oliver has broken free from the oppressive influence of fate that he imagined, and his choice is strong enough that he envisions it even altering Shakespeare’s text, which he reveres.
Themes
Oliver is taken to the police station and detained before his trial. He doesn’t speak to Caroline, his mother, or his father again, but he apologizes to Leah over and over when she comes to see him at the police station. Oliver thinks of Meredith often, knowing that he’s effectively answered the question she asked him on the night of his arrest. He wants to see James most of all. When he does come to the police station, he begs Oliver to stop and let him take the rightful blame. In a parenthetical, Oliver recalls that James later came to visit him often in prison and asked him every time to let him confess. Oliver always refused. The last time he saw James was in 2003. James kissed his hand and left, telling Oliver he was going to “Hell. Del Norte. Nowhere. I don’t know.”
Oliver has put James before all else—most strikingly, before Leah and Meredith. Looking at the situation from their perspective makes Oliver’s actions look rather less heroic. While Oliver is saving James from going to prison, he can’t save James from torturing himself with guilt—it’s in his nature, and it’s become clear that he does love Oliver, after all. James’s last words to Oliver sound as if he’s simply unsure of where to go, but read literally, they sound like he might be considering suicide as an option.
Themes
At Oliver’s trial, Filippa, James, and Alexander testify. Meredith refuses to answer any questions. Even though it seems like everyone expects an apology from Oliver, he doesn’t give one. In the end, Oliver and his lawyer settle for ten years in prison for second-degree murder. Colborne offers him a chance to tell the truth, but Oliver refuses, telling Colborne: “I am myself indifferent honest; […] We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”
Meredith tried to imprison James, and when Oliver thwarts her, her silence suggests mixed emotions on her end: anger at him for abandoning her, but also her willingness to cooperate with his scheme. Like a classic Shakespearean villain, Oliver’s refusal to speak and his claim to untrustworthiness calls the entirety of the story he’s told up until now into question; actors are liars, after all. On a meta level, this is all a lie, a fictional story.
Themes
