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'It's a co-production with The Young Vic Company,' says Conway. 'We worked together with them on everything, agreed the production team, shared the costs of physical production. They coordinated the community side of things for the four London stagings at St John's, Waterloo in early September; we've overseen those in the provinces for the rest of the tour.

'All this involved a lot of preliminary spadework in outlying areas, like Cumbria and Devon, tracking down local talent! Tim Yealland, our Outreach Director, has been out in the field for the past year rustling up performers. We also rely quite heavily on local animateurs, choir directors who're giving their time for nothing, and also the outreach teams from those theatres to which we regularly go, and regularly sell out in.

'In due course we send our assistant director and conductor up for a series of rehearsals with each community group -- then finally put it together in three days. That's quite an organisational challenge!

'Some venues are so cramped that our Technical Manager, David Ferrier, sometimes gives me at look as if to say, "You're a sadist!" But people in Cumbria pay their taxes too; and our tours are supported by the Arts Council England. You have to make things work in smaller venues: their audiences matter just as much. It's a problem for a designer; but if a designer doesn't like problem-solving, he's working for the wrong company!'

ETO's Tobias and the Angel is conducted by Tim Murray and directed by John Fulljames, who is also the director of another touring ensemble, The Opera Group. Fulljames's own company has been justly praised for taking on the road productions of rarely seen repertoire by Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, as well as more staple diet such as a hilarious Walton's and Bernstein's Candide and Trouble in Tahiti, the last of which was seen at Buxton, Huddersfield and various venues in the South and Midlands this summer.

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