The Magnificent Red Button

The red button is the production the archive loved most. For no other play in the company's catalogue did the record keep so much: a colour logo, two group photographs of the 2006 cast taken in a rehearsal room, a RealAudio song file, a Windows Media clip, and the twin page addresses that both eras of the site gave it. The Magnificent Red Button is the fullest playbill in this cahier.

What the sheet keeps

The 2006 cast photographs show what a small touring company actually looked like: a handful of adults in rehearsal blacks, grouped in front of a bare wall, the kind of picture taken because someone remembered to bring a camera. The logo is flat and bright, a circle of red the size of a badge, drawn to be recognised by a seven-year-old from the back of a cafetorium.

The song file is titled only by initials, which is how the company kept its media: three letters and a format. The video clip was one of the site's selling points, a short taste of the production that a music teacher could play for a principal to justify the booking.

The story it was built to tell

A button is a perfect children's-theatre object: small, ordinary, and capable of being made magnificent by a story. The company's character-education brief turned on objects like this, things a child already knew, suddenly revealed as important. The play's title does the whole dramaturgy in four words, and the surviving artwork keeps the same confidence, one red circle against white.

The play also carried the company's practical hope, which shows in the paperwork of the era: assembly bookings, reservation forms, the CD version sold for the drive home. A production that could be watched, bought on disc, and sung afterwards was a production that paid for the next one.

Why the button got the most paper

The thickness of the file is not an accident of the crawler. The button's materials cluster around 2006, and the cast photographs, the logo and the clips all carry the same season's smell: a production the company was actively pushing that year, freshly rehearsed, freshly photographed, freshly uploaded.

A touring play has a hot year the way a book has a launch season. The record catches the button at exactly that moment, which is why its sheet is the cahier's fullest: not because the play mattered more than the others, but because the archive happened to look while it was being promoted.

The production's afterlife on the site is worth noting as well. Long after the 2006 photographs were taken, the rebuilt site still gave the button its own page under a new address, proof that the play stayed in the repertoire across the whole life of the record. A button does not wear out the way a costume does, and the company evidently treated the show the same way.

The sheet therefore holds the production twice over: once as a play with a cast and a season, once as the company's own idea of a flagship. Both readings are bound here, with the 2006 photographs keeping the people and the logo keeping the object, the red circle that a generation of gymnasiums was asked to admire.

How the volume files it

Bound in Cahier I, first among equals, because the record gave it the most pages. The cast photographs are noted as 2006; the rest of the file carries no year, which is how the archive found it.

Cahier I · signature 4 of 4