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Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, acknowledged by Derek Paget in NTQ 12 (November 1987) as a formative influence on the emergence of what he called `Verbatim Theatre', have been given a new lease of life following their recent release by Topic Records; but his theatrical experiments in multi-media documentary, which he envisaged as a model for `engendering direct creativity in the common people', remain largely unknown. The most ambitious of these--The Maker and the Tool, staged as part of the Centre 42 festivals of 1961-62--is exemplary of the impulse to recreate a popular culture which preoccupied many of those involved in the Centre 42 venture. David Watt, who teaches Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, began researching these experiments with work on a case study of Banner Theatre of Actuality, the company Parker co-founded in 1973, for Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970, co-authored with Alan Filewod. This led to further research in the Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham Central Library, and the author is grateful to the Charles Parker Archive Trust and the staff of the Birmingham City Archives (particularly Fiona Tait) for the opportunity to explore its holdings and draw on them for this article.

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986), Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue - while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council - the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain - introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.