Vanessa Redgrave has urged businesses and entrepreneurs to give money to help restore Britain’s coronavirus-threatened arts ecosystem. The actor was joined by Sir Lenny Henry, Maxine Peake and Sir Trevor Nunn on Tuesday evening outside the National Theatre in support of an appeal to save jobs across the sector. The arts is one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic, with unions and politicians predicting a “tsunami” of job losses. In July the government announced a £1.57bn cultural recovery package, which includes grants and loans aimed at helping organisations survive the crisis. But it is not meant to directly protect every job. Arts Council England, which is deciding where money goes, has warned that it will be unable to save every organisation. “But we have to save everybody, is the point,” Redgrave said. “We have to save the arts for everybody.” The actor said the gathering was not a protest or political, describing it as an appeal for support from people who work in the arts. “We’ve got to restore everything as it was, but better than before,” Redgrave said. “We theatre and arts people must campaign to raise funds from private enterprise to add to any government funds, so that we can help to restore all the facilities and jobs of all the theatres, music and dance venues, museums, galleries, technical and creatives, teachers and coaches.” The event began with musician Owain Harries and 18-year-old graduate Benjamin Amissah sounding their trumpets. Harries was due to begin rehearsals as first trumpet in a new West End production of Hello Dolly. Instead, he is working in Sainsbury’s. Henry said the plight of freelancers was an urgent one. “Stage managers, designers, voice coaches, choreographers, directors, composers, actors, comedians, animal trainers, musicians, fight directors … are leaving the industry in droves as they can’t afford to stay. The worry is, once we do come back to work, there won’t be any freelancers left.” He said some theatres had closed down “and we could lose large swathes of our ecosystem” unless urgent action was taken. If more small or regional theatres start to disappear it will leave a “cultural vacuum’ in towns and cities. Nunn said in the 16th century, after the plague, it was vastly rich nobles who came to the rescue. “Today there is an equivalent source of wealth in the world,” he said. “ So Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google all of you ... please. You trillionaire and multibillionaire companies - will you come to the rescue? Will you save our culture?” Peake read an extract from Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art and Redgrave read out messages of support from Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, and actors Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson. Neeson said: “A true society cannot be whole nor fundamentally exist without the arts and the people employed in the arts. “Culture is our society’s compass, our north star. If we lose our compass, we all lose our way. This appeal requires urgent attention. The character of our very existence as a nation is at stake.” The plan is to have a similar gathering, at Laurence Olivier’s statue, on the first day of every month to publicly renew the appeal. An estimated 5,000 jobs in theatre alone have already been lost because of the pandemic. At the weekend a protest was held on London’s South Bank against more than 1,000 jobs being shed at the National Theatre, Tate and the Southbank Centre. Last week the Royal Shakespeare Company became the latest arts organisation to announce it was to begin consultation on redundancies “to safeguard the long-term future of the company”. It also confirmed it would not reopen for full performances before 2021. A number of benevolent funds, such as the Theatre Artists Fund and the Help Musicians’ Financial Hardship Funding programme, have been set up to provide emergency help to people who need it most. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics suggests the arts and entertainment industries are being hit harder by the pandemic than other areas of the economy. It showed that 23% of businesses in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector had reported severe to moderate risk of insolvency, compared with 11% across all industries.