★★★☆☆
Three Stars
“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us/And it ain’t me who’s going to
leave,” insists Russel Mael in the eponymous Sparks song. In You Maverick, written by Matt Parvin, two young men sing a similar tune at each other, except the town is an unnamed Oxford college and leaving means expulsion, something most students here envision only in nightmares.
The play opens on what appears to be a legal meeting but is revealed to
be an academic hearing of sorts. The bumbling man in a suit is not a lawyer but Timbey (Charlie Metcalfe), a counsellor mourning the glory days he never had as an undergraduate at the college where he now works. “This is a welfare meeting,” he tells Gregory (Charlie Hooper), a fast-talking lad accused of plagiarism. Kasper (Tim Drummond) is the kid whose paper he has, by all appearances, ripped off, and who sits silently as Gregory delivers a dubious self-defence. He has clearly copied, says Timbey—why not come clean. No, Gregory chides; he has apparently done so—and he’ll stake his academic fate on the difference.
If the many elements of You Maverick are laced with a single theme, it is the danger of mistaking evidence for clarity. The meeting of the opening scene proves the first of several, as Kasper levies allegations of increasing consequence against Gregory, and Timbey’s sensibilities are torn between the outsider with whom he identifies and the insider whom he wishes to be. That Gregory has done all that he stands accused of we never doubt, but as the punishment he faces becomes more severe, roles of victim and aggressor become increasingly duplicitous. “Maybe I can be both fragile and scare you,” Kasper tells Gregory, and we believe him.
If You Maverick has a weakness, it is occasional heavy-handedness. Gregory and Timbey deliver what amount to soliloquys in the guise of dialogue, and Kasper’s homoerotic taunting of Gregory once the tables have turned feels cliché, or at least overplayed—as does some superfluous symbolism having to do with sunlight. One hopes that Parvin will approach future scripts with more confidence in the subtlety of his own writing and the intuition of his audience to read between the lines. When Timbey tells Gregory, “I’m here to help, not accuse,” his naiveté in thinking the two distinct is not lost on us.
