It’s a chilly spring evening in what was once a Catholic church in a left-behind County Durham pit village, and Ian McKellen admits he is feeling emotional.

“This is the only company of actors in the United Kingdom and it’s in … Horden?” he says. “I’m feeling very emotional. This fulfils all my romantic dreams I’ve had ever since I discovered the joys of theatre-going and acting.”

On Saturday, McKellen formally opened a new space for Ensemble 84, a theatre company formed 18 months ago that auditioned for local talent and gave people jobs as actors and performers.

This is how it should be, McKellen told the Guardian. He said it was “shameful” that the opportunity to join a professional repertory company of actors, for performers to learn their trade as he and others had done, no longer existed.

“The National Theatre makes its own sets,” he said. “It has a wig department. It has a makeup department. It has a property department. It has a set department. It has a publicity department. They’re all on salary. Some of them will be on a pension.

“The National Theatre doesn’t employ actors full-time. They’re hired helps. That’s not right. Laurence Olivier was a working actor and he ran that company in the same spirit that Henry Irving had run his company.”

The same criticism could be levelled at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It is no longer a ‘company’,” he said. “Actors make each other better when they work together over a long period. The only place in the country that is using actors under contract to do plays over a number of months, if not years, to do plays is in Horden? Where?”

Many people will be asking the same question. Those who do know Horden will know that the village, on the east Durham coast near Peterlee, is only ever in the news if it is a story about poverty, or crime, or its numbered streets, or how cheap it is to buy a property.

Ensemble 84 has already staged Brecht’s More Courage and Her Children, as translated and adapted for them by Lee Hall. Next up is Hamlet.

The company was founded by the theatre director Mark Dornford-May, who 25 years ago, following a similar model, co-founded the internationally acclaimed Isango Ensemble in a township on the edge of Cape Town in South Africa.

Ensemble 84 was still only 18 months old, said Dornford-May, but “we are now probably the biggest employer in Horden since the National Coal Board closed”.

“Isn’t that extraordinary? A theatre company replaces the NCB in terms of employment opportunities. It’s just phenomenal,” he said. “There has been so little hope here and we are offering hope. Horden in the media is ‘the worst place in County Durham’ or it’s drugs or it’s poverty or whatever, but the heart that this community had during the miners’ strike is still there.

“It’s had a couple of palpitations but if you look for it you’ll still find it … its heart still beats. We’ve managed to tap into that, which is magical.”

The company has a core cast of 15 performers. They include Willow Pearson, who gave up studying biochemistry at university to join the ensemble. “The concept of a theatre company in Horden is fantastic,” she said. “Why shouldn’t there be one?”

Wendy Hindmarch worked as a civil servant and was missing her son, who had flown the nest to study drama in London.

“I was just scrolling Facebook and I saw the audition notice and thought well, I’ve got a good job, a good pension, but I’ll just go along and see what happens,” she said. “I didn’t really expect to get in and then I did, and yes, it’s changed my life. I love this job more than anything. I can’t imagine going back to the office.”

On Saturday McKellen cut the red ribbon at the Our Lady, Star of the Sea Catholic church venue, now called the Playhouse. He entertained an invited audience with anecdotes from a career as one of Britain’s finest classical actors, as well as playing Gandalf and Magneto.

Off the top of his head he performed “All the world’s a stage” from As You Like It and watched, gripped, as Ensemble 84 actors sang and performed scenes from the forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s First Quarto of Hamlet, an earlier, shorter version of the standard.

McKellen said he might be 86, but he if lived in Horden he too would have auditioned. He might even have got a call-back, joked Dornford-May.