This article juxtaposes the recent work of Peter Brook with a Bristol-based mental health service-user collective--Stepping Out Theatre Company. Informed by field-work with the company, this chapter explores the aesthetic and political relationship between professional, experimental theatre work and community-based performance practice. Drawing new material together for the first time, this article examines the current relationship between seemingly disparate notions of the radical and the popular, the marginal and the elite, the oppositional and the celebratory. This article seeks not only to interrogate the politics of the terms and standards by which these seemingly distinct companies are assessed, but also to place them in dialogue and explore their points of commonality and divergence. By exploring these issues this article will show that, despite appearances, key aspects of C.I.R.T.'s (International Centre for Theatre Research) recent work and Stepping Out are similarly engaged with a performance practice that is ethically minded and engaged with the socio-political efficacy of theatre. It is the contention of this article that both Brook and Hennessy are alive to the potential of theatre as a space of ethical negotiation and socially relevant dialogue. The article contends that for Brook and Stepping Out, form and content; aesthetics and social politics; theatre and society coalesce in a dynamic of possibility. (Contains 2 figures and 12 notes.)