Sir Ian McKellen opens former pit village theatre
BBCA theatre company in a former pit village is bringing "enormous possibilities for change and renewal", one of the UK's most famous actors has said.
Lord Of The Rings star Sir Ian McKellen was visiting Ensemble 84, a theatre company in Horden, County Durham, for the official opening of the Playhouse, its new space in a disused Catholic church.
Founded in 2024, the company holds auditions offering mostly local people work and training as paid professional actors.
Sir Ian, 86, said: "To see the joy with which they talk about their work is very moving. It begins with changing their lives and then they'll change other people's lives."
The company was founded by the theatre director Mark Dornford-May, who created a similar project, Isango Ensemble, in a township on the edge of Cape Town in South Africa 25 years ago.
The Horden company has a core cast of paid performers including 23-year-old Willow Pearson, from Peterlee, who was studying for a biochemistry degree when she auditioned.
"I got an email to say I'd got it while I was in a practical so, yeah, I dropped out of uni," she said.
"I finished the practical though," she added, laughing.
Keith Irons, 63, from Darlington, joined after decades working in the print trade.
"At the time I was driving a minibus because I needed to earn some money and someone sent me a link for the auditions," he said.
"With Ensemble 84 I got six months training and I earned a wage."
The theatre company is funded through Durham County Council, Arts Council England and the UK Government's Shared Prosperity Fund.
Its name is a nod to the 1984 miners' strike, a defining moment in the history of British coal mining.
The closure three years later of Horden Colliery, once one of the largest in Britain, precipitated the area's decline into one of high unemployment where child poverty is twice the national average.
Janet Brown, a former school year manager and now a designer and member of the ensemble, said the area needed "something to give it a boost".
"Being here we've also connected to the most amazing people," she added.
Dornford-May said Horden was the right place for the project.
"It seemed to me the east side of the county had less access to the arts than anyone else, and then this incredible space came up.
"So we're here now which is just magnificent."
