Farewell to Music Theatre London

Music Theatre London has been a significant influence on opera performance practice over the last fifteen years. It has, I hope given pleasure to a lot of people and provided employment for a lot of actors, musicians and technicians, (albeit at the lower end of the financial scale!) But, like all good things, it must come to an end.

I had long ago given up applying for finance from the Arts Council - MTL was clearly considered to be "not quite the thing" and the application process is so convoluted that it only seems to work for large companies, who can afford the time and personnel to wade through the paperwork. its also fair to say that I have not been popular with the funders - some years ago a senior figure in the touring department declined an invitation to a production because she was "scared of Tony Britten" - which either means I'm some sort of psychopath or she was a tad on the inadequate side.

Sponsorship is also hard to come by unless you can devote a massive amount of time to it and I need to spend a massive amount of time making Capriol Films a success. So the trustees of MTL have decided that we will make the company dormant. This does not preclude starting up again in the future, or indeed trading under the name if an interesting offer to produce a show from a third party comes our way.

I will be making strenuous efforts to produce more films like "Boheme" and "Falstaff", there is, after all a quite large catalogue of MTL productions which lend themselves very well to this medium. So if anyone reading this has not registered their interest in future television, DVD and Internet downloads of MTL material, please, go to the contacts page on this website and let us know that you want to be kept in touch. You are part of a niche market that is increasingly poorly served by conventional broadcasting and I intend to do something about it.