Afterthought Theatre Productions (ATP) have produced and performed many shows including:
The Stern Headmistress at Eastbourne Wyntercon
Romeo and Juliet for Shoreham Wordfest

Afterthought has provided directing and creative and technical survices to many productions including The Engagement at the Hove Grown festival of new drama and The Trials of Colonel Barker.

ATP has collaborated on short film, audio drama and theatre productions in the region and regularly participate in the Brighton Filmmakers Group

Philippa’s learning and development business, Speaking Well In Public, is a sponsor of the New Venture Theatre and Murder Actually, the actor run murder mystery group.

Philippa and Thomas are currently Chair and Secretary of Sussex Playwrights.

Sussex Playwrights Club (SPC)

Chair: Philippa Hammond
Secretary: Thomas Everchild

Honorary President: William Nicholson
Honorary Vice President: Judy Upton

Sussex Playwrights began in 1935 as a gathering of professional working playwrights who’d had work produced in the region and on the West End stage.
Pausing only for World War 2 and lockdown, the club has continued ever since, meeting the first Sunday of every month at the New Venture Theatre bar, Brighton.
Over nine decades the club has evolved, welcoming writing for radio, film, TV and on-line.
Our core aim is to promote and celebrate new writing in the region.

At our regular meetings we host:

• Guest speakers
• Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe previews
• The First Five Pages exercise with a professional TV screenwriter
• Writing prompts
• Writing competitions
• Works in progress – extracts with discussions and peer group feedback
• Rehearsed readings with professional actors
• Christmas and summer parties
• And we also run Sussex Playwrights Reviews

All are welcome to attend a meeting as a guest member at £5, to include drinks.
Full Membership of £30 a year is available.

Sussex Playwrights Website

We launched Brighton Actors Networking Group (BANG) on Facebook for:

• Actors at all stages of their development
• Drama makers in all disciplines
• Providers of goods and services of interest to them, such as headshots
• photography, drama training, show-reel production etc

In the Brighton and Hove and the surrounding region.

We aim to promote productions, training and casting opportunities, while highlighting relevant news and issues to the community.

As of summer 2025, there are over 6,600 members in the region, with many projects cast via BANG.

Dan Leno, major Victorian music hall star made around a dozen short reels for The London Mutoscope Company.

In the early part of the 20th century, many locations would feature Mutoscopes, a machines into which you fed a coin, turn a handle and view a short moving image, a drum of single photographs that worked like a simple flick book. The reels lasted for only about 30 seconds. As projected formats gained popularity the Mutoscope machines found their way to seaside amusement arcades and onto piers around the country to be popularly know as What The Butler Saw machines.

Leno was thought to have made around a dozen Mutographs which were thought lost (apart from The Reluctant Cork, a short extract on a smaller format intended for home use) found in a local museum.

Then collector (and Mutoscope owner) John Henty was given a cardboard box containing over 800 cards intended to be viewed on a Mutoscope reel. But the cards did not fit his machine’s format.

Thomas had researched the Mutoscope while writing the one-act play Turning The Handle for the Glimpse collection and was later introduced to John Henty as a Mutoscope owner.

Thomas pointed out that the collection of cards could be copied and animated using a computer and so about 100 cards were taken to make a test.

A makeshift animation stand was constructed on a kitchen table using a small digital camera.

Up to this point it was believed that the cards, which featured a family in a garden, was a home movie from around the 1920s, but on seeing the women’s clothing Philippa placed the images much earlier, close to the turn of the century.

John Henty did some additional research and discovered that the reel was of Dan Leno and his family, one of the legendary lost reels, Breakfast At Dan Leno’s made in 1902, just two years before Leno’s death.

Cue the scanning of the reel in high definition by Thomas and Philippa and a painstaking digital restoration by Thomas.

The restored short film from these Mutoscope cards has featured in an exhibition at the British Library and the British Music Hall Society’s anniversary celebrations.

A small piece of English Victorian theatre, music hall, comedy and infant cinema history is saved.

And finally…

The cards had been given to John by the husband of Dan Leno’s granddaughter. The cards certainly originally owned by Dan Leno’s family, and possible by Dan Leno himself…

Philippa and Thomas present their Acting And Directing From A Script programme which holds the principle that most acting work is script-based and that the practical opportunity to work with a script is valuable to actors at any stage of their development.

Over the four week programme, participants begin with a brief warm-up and an exercise, then are split into groups, often with a director, and given original short scripts they have never seen before.
For the remainder of each session they’ll read, set up and rehearse their scripts and then perform to the rest of the group.

It’s an intensive, on your feet experience, performing script-in-hand to an audience in a safe and friendly environment.