Impresario hopes Mountview Academy donation will help prove ‘you don’t have to be posh’ to get on in theatre

Sir Cameron Mackintosh has given £1m to help one of the UK’s most diverse drama schools in the hope it will prove “you don’t have to be posh” to get on in the theatre.

The producer’s donation to Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts completes a £6.5m fundraising campaign for the school’s new £30m home in Peckham, south London, and will mean its plans for 200-seat theatre space can be completed.

The school had been in Crouch End and Wood Green in north London since 1945. Mackintosh said it was an “inspired idea” to relocate the school to “an exciting and diverse borough of London, far away from the leafy, affluent suburbs where drama schools are usually sited”.

He added: “A lot has been written recently, sometimes unfairly, about careers in the theatre being out of reach to anyone who is not from a well-heeled background. The new Mountview will prove that to get on, you don’t have to be posh. You just have to be good.”

Anecdotal evidence and several studies shows working-class people continue to be hugely under-represented in the arts. A report, declaring it an “arts emergency”, last year revealed only 12% of people working in film, TV and radio were from a working-class background. In the performing arts it is 18%. The figure should be closer to a third.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in Peckham. Photograph: Tim Crocker

The report also noted that the people in positions of power, mostly well-paid, middle-class white men, were least likely to see the problem.

Labour has said class is often missing in debates about access to, and diversity within, the performing arts, and the party has called for government action. Equity’s president, Maureen Beattie, has spoken of it becoming more difficult for people from working-class backgrounds to get in to the industry.

“We have got a big problem in our business of it reverting to what it was like before I went to drama school,” she said. “In the 60s I looked at the people graduating from the great drama schools, coming out of Rada, they all spoke with cut glass accents, mummy and daddy had money to put them through it.”

When the BBC’s The Night Manager series finished, it was noted that the three main actors – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Tom Hollander – had all attended the elite Dragon prep school in Oxford.

Many believe the biggest problem is the decline of arts and creative teaching in schools, caused by funding cuts and the lack of a compulsory arts subject in the new English baccalaureate.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Cameron Mackintosh at the Novello theatre, March 2011. Photograph: Jason Alden/Jason Alden / Rex Features

The sheer cost of getting in to drama school is one issue. Another, said the chair of Mountview, Vikki Heywood, is the perception among many young people that the profession is not for them.

The school, she said, was doing a lot of work in that area. A key part of the school’s philosophy was that it regarded the ability to perform Shakespeare as an exit requirement for an actor, not an entry requirement.

“In our auditions, you have to do a piece of poetry or prose but you can choose that from your culture, it doesn’t have to be Shakespeare.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mountview Academy third-year Musical Theatre students in a production of Crazy For You. Photograph: Robert Workman/Robert Workman Photographer

“When you leave Mountview you have to be able to perform Shakespeare exceptionally, but not in your audition. I think that is a really important leveller of the playing field.”

Heywood said the Cameron donation was “a game changer” for the school.

The school’s president of 14 years is Dame Judi Dench, who has spoken of her concerns over acting becoming a profession dependent on how rich your parents are.

Dench said Mackintosh told her of his plan in a handwritten note. “I was overwhelmed. His extraordinary gift is a milestone moment in Mountview’s history, completing its new home in Peckham and giving generations of students for years to come a world-class stage to match the calibre of its training.”

Mountview alumni includes actors Eddie Marsan, Amanda Holden and Douglas Henshall, playwrights Ayub Khan-Din and Giles Terera, a star of Hamilton, which was brought to the West End of London by Mackintosh.

Terera said working with Mackintosh on Hamilton was a highlight of his career and he was thrilled by the Mountview donation. “The training I received at Mountview has been the foundation of my career and has allowed me to go on to perform Shakespeare and Ibsen as well as West End musicals. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin my journey as an actor.”

Half of Mountview’s students receive a means-tested bursary and the school said the Cameron donation meant it could concentrate on raising money for bursaries and hardship funds.