Matthew Townshend Productions
Matthew Townshend is the man behind mtp.
A former member of the National Youth Theatre and Cambridge University graduate, he boasts a long career in theatre – as an actor, director, producer, teacher and writer.
On stage and in tour
He has appeared on stage nationwide and in London at the King’s Head, Latchmere, Shaw and Jeanetta Cochrane theatres as well as on the South Bank at the Purcell Room.
He has also toured nationwide in children’s theatre and has performed in more than 20 seasons in pantomime alongside Barbara Windsor, Jack Smethurst, and the Nolans.
As writer and director he was responsible for the first ever Christmas show in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing theatre.
In 1989 he became Artistic Director of the Spectrum’s Nextage Theatre at the Gordon Craig Theatre in Stevenage. Here he produced an early adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
An orator and educator
Matthew is deeply passionate about education in the theatre and has an enviable ability to engage and connect with young people.
After many years on stage he went on the become Artistic Director of the Young National Trust Theatre, the National Trust’s prestigious Theatre-in-Education company.
He maintains a specialisation in Drama for learning and lectures in Performing Arts at Further and Higher Education level.
mtp and rave reviews
His company – mtp – was launched in 2000.
Since then Matthew has taken both small scale and number one productions on tour and worked on a range of different projects including community and young peoples’ drama and peer education programmes.
Tours mounted by mtp include the 50th anniversary production of the classic British musical Salad Days.
And, as a result of its success, in 2006 he won a new producer’s bursary from the Society of London Theatres supported by, among others, the Cameron Mackintosh foundation.
In 2013 and 2014 mtp was asked to produce the summer season at Frinton on Sea, the UK’s longest surviving professional seasonal repertory theatre.
Here, he made huge waves in the media with a celebrity-endorsed campaign to support the theatre and went on to complete a record breaking 75th anniversary year.
This included productions starring many well known actors from stage, TV and the music world including Richard Wilson, Vicki Michelle and Jacqui Dankworth.
In 2014 mtp developed a new musical play with score and lyrics by the legendary Neil Innes (Bonzo Dog Doodah band, The Rutles, Monty Python) called The Rake’s Return.
The production was showcased in April in the new Britten Studio theatre at Snape Maltings in Suffolk.
In 2016, mtp toured a production of Noel & Gertie, a play performed during the Frinton season. The show was toured up and down the country. It met with rave reviews across the country and gained coverage in both national and regional press as well as radio interviews for it’s stars Ben Stock (Noel Coward) and Helen Power (Gertrude Lawrence).
