Many older actors in Britain will be cheering Judi Dench to the rafters for her display of anger that new financial barriers to training have made the acting profession more elitist ("Dench laments actors held back by wealth divide", News). And also for the regret she expresses at the demise of repertory theatre, which provided such splendid experiences that were the basis of the acclaimed excellence of many British actors.
For all that drama schools endeavour to help their chosen students find a financial way through the usually three-year course, there are many students who fall by the wayside. Worse still, many are too daunted by the impossibly high fees even to apply.
Young people with rich parents have other unfair advantages. Their private schools, such as Eton, may employ a theatre professional to stage school plays. They can afford the average £45 charged to audition for a drama school and they can apply to dozen of schools to give themselves many chances. They can pay £800 to do a two-week course on how to audition or £10,000 to do a six-month foundation course at a recognised drama school.
Philip Hedley
Director emeritus
Theatre Royal Stratford East
As a 25-year-old struggling actor, it is a daily frustration to me that opportunities seem open only to an "elite" few.
However, I am confused by how in this article it is lamented that acting has become too "middle class" while in the same breath it is said that our top actors come from a handful of elite schools. How are these one and the same thing? I would consider myself middle class, having grown up in perfectly comfortable circumstances, but I was educated in the state system and certainly have no "connections".
The idea that drama school is too expensive is, I believe, distorting the point. Most drama schools are now affiliated to universities and offer BA courses at exactly the same price as any university course. Therefore it is possible, as I did, to get a student loan. It is still expensive, but less so than it used to be and certainly no more so than a normal degree course.
Many of the posh actors who are big at the moment did not even go to drama school, but were, rather, fast-tracked into the profession by connections. It is this network at the top of the industry that must be stopped for the sake of our acting industry.
Natalie Bray
London EC1
Judi Dench is absolutely right about the impossibility of the less well off now entering the acting profession, and she is also right to ascribe this to the demise of local repertory theatres.
May I add a further point?
Not only does the disappearance of the local rep deprive Britain's potential talent of its chance to develop, but it also denies the public access to what is perhaps our greatest artistic achievement of the last 400 years: live drama. In what Dame Judi rightly calls "a civilised country", everyone, from their very earliest years and on their own doorstep, should be able and encouraged to enjoy the excitement of our national genius through familiarity, and not just as part of the GCSE syllabus. Let us have cinema, television, popular music, DVDs, the internet – and live theatre. The latter is globally acknowledged to be the greatest since Athens, as my own experiences in Moscow, Japan, Brazil, China and elsewhere testify. Yet it is denied to most of us in the UK.
As with swimming pools, libraries and museums, there should be an active professional theatre in every town and city. People, their children, and their talented forebears deserve no less.
Ian Flintoff
Former RSC and National Theatre actor
Oxford
