Origins

Banner Theatre was founded in 1973/4 and creates powerful, innovative, issue-based multimedia theatre productions, which it tours to community audiences.

The company pioneered and continues to use documentary theatre techniques. Productions include recorded interview material, theatre, song, music, video and slides. Above all, what makes the company unique is its use of "actuality" - ordinary people's words captured by the tape recorder.

Banner is the only theatre company that tours consistently to Britain's trade unionists, a potential audience of eight million. The company has performed at trade union events, pubs, clubs, theatres, festivals and rallies over the past 30 years.

A founder member of the company was former BBC radio producer Charles Parker, who with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, created the radio ballads, award-winning musical documentaries broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s. These have been a major influence on Banner’s work and have recently informed our development of the 'video ballad'.

Banner Theatre's archive is held in Birmingham Central Library and has been catalogued as part of the Connecting Histories project.

Banner Theatre - from the Performing Resistance section of Connecting Histories

Other background information:

Banner Theatre - What Kind of Theatre?
article written by Dave Rogers in 1997

Complete list of Banner Projects since 1973

Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the labour movement since 1970
Alan Filewod & David Watt; Currency Press, Strawberry Hills; 2001