The theme of interpretive variability in the previous chapter, Sudoku Shakespeare, is focused here, in Red Button Shakespeare, on the materiality and ephemerality of spectatorship, the notion that, as Andrew James Hartley puts it,

In order to facilitate such multiple audience perspectives – and the interpretive variabilities they potentially make possible – whether in spat-upon or Godslike, or a range of other proximities and orientations to the staged action, I have, for this chapter, fixed upon a model of interactive sports coverage, whereby the viewer can, by virtue of the remote control red button, appreciate the spectacle from a number of alternative perspectives. On the football (soccer) pitch these include: regular viewing angle; bird's-eye view; goal-to-goal; ‘player-cam’; highlights reel; and ‘fanzone’. And in order to exemplify this argument of perspective- informed-interpretation, I have chosen a production from the three-dimensional and multi-perspectival reconstructed Globe Theatre (or, handy dandy, was it because I chose this theatre that I developed the argument?), Dominic Dromgoole's 2008 revival of King Lear starring David Calder as the king. I have focused on the blinding of Gloucester (3.7), the terrible mutilations of which I watched six times in the theatre – from a variety of vantage points, including: in the yard, ‘front and centre’; from the upper gallery; side on, middle gallery; and ‘behind’ the action adjacent to the ‘upstage’ left and right corners of the stage – and then several times later via archive recordings.

The structural interactivity of the main body of this chapter, which juxtaposes each of these separate viewpoints, is designed to be performative, therefore, in that it evokes the simultaneity and multiplicity of the theatrical event. It is also intended as a challenge to performance criticism that silently elides its situatedness in the best (or sole) seat in the house. That is not to say, however, that my methodology is without limitations.