Daniel Day-Lewis contends that theatre is intrinsically elitist and dependent on privilege (‘Theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people’: Daniel Day-Lewis talks class, cinema and his crush on Mary Poppins, 15 October). He is wrong.

Far from standing still, the theatre sector has for many years placed inclusion at its heart, with free and subsidised tickets, relaxed, captioned or signed performances, community partnerships, touring to underserved areas, and outreach in schools.

These are not token gestures – they are central to how theatre now operates, and to the sense of shared belonging that live performance creates.

Where we have fallen short as a nation is not in our theatres, but in valuing creativity within education. The decline of drama and the arts in schools is not an inevitability but a policy choice – and a missed opportunity we can still reverse if we choose to. Rather than bemoaning what is lost, we should champion what could be gained.

We are hopeful that the upcoming curriculum review will place creativity at the heart of education for the next generation, and we urge the government to recognise the social and economic power of access to culture by backing our Theatre For Every Child campaign.

Every child deserves the chance to experience live theatre: to see their world reflected, and to imagine the world anew.
Hannah Essex
Co-chief executive, Society of London Theatre

Daniel Day-Lewis is quite right. I remember seeing Arnold Wesker’s Roots with Joan Plowright at London’s Royal Court theatre in the early 1960s. As a newly arrived working-class emigrant from Scotland, I couldn’t understand why the audience was laughing in what, to me, were all the wrong places. Then I realised – they were all middle class, and while the play was about working-class life, Roots seemed to have been written just for them. This same class is still dominant in London theatre, if not elsewhere in Britain.
Robert Parkhill
Isleworth, London