Cameron Mackintosh Foundation donates additional £500,000 to Theatre Artists Fund

The fund provides financial aid to theatre workers affected by the pandemic.

Last year, Sam Mendes, Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre collectively set up the Theatre Artists Fund, directly helping those in the industry. Cameron Mackintosh's self-named Foundation has donated a further £500,000 to the fund, giving over £1 million to various initiatives throughout the pandemic.

Discussing the new donation, Mackintosh said: 'Though the Government's exemplary vaccine programme has shown that there is now light at the end of the tunnel, the probability is that it will still be over seven months before the West End has the majority of its major shows back.

This latest grant from my Foundation... will hopefully help some of our hard-hit freelancers to get through until we can employ them again, provided there are no further shutdowns which would be catastrophic."

Cameron Mackintosh is a producer behind West End shows like Les Miserables, Mary Poppins, The Phantom of the Opera and Hamilton, all scheduled to return to the West End in 2021. More information on West End returning dates can be found here. 

Sam Mendes, director and co-founder of the Theatre Artists Fund, said: "We are immensely grateful to the Mackintosh Foundation for this extraordinarily generous contribution. Throughout the process of setting up the Theatre Artists Fund, we have been consistently moved by the feeling that the theatre community is pulling together to support and protect its most vulnerable members, and this is a wonderful example of exactly that."

^{Photo credit: Cameron Mackintosh (Photo by Tolga Akmen/Chicago Tribune)}