Notes associated with video EM_2_1

] He offers to kiss her, she strikes him O; She strikes him MS. O is more explicit than MS. The moment exemplifies the slowly changing power relations between the two characters, especially since it is claimed by Rafe as a victory: he has managed to make bodily contact with her, even if that contact takes the form of her hitting him. Rafe could be played as a sinister sexual predator, but workshopping revealed the potential for broad comedy in the sequence: see clip [see video EM_2_1]. The workshopping also raised other questions of performance and interpretation. Dionysia, as performed in this clip, shows no sense that she has crossed a line with Rafe in physically touching him, and that lack of awareness is an important element of a purely comic interpretation of the scene. An alternative interpretation would be to stage it more as it appears in Rafe's imagination, and to give Dionysia some inkling that she has started to compromise herself with Rafe in reacting at all to his demands for a reward. In a sense, the strength of the scene lies in the fact that it is both things at once: the intimacy between them is both a comic self-delusion on Rafe's part, and also and at the same time the early stages of the potentially life-threatening disaster which nearly comes to pass in Act Five.