The New Venture Theatre company converted the former Christchurch Schoolrooms in Bedford Place into a theatre space in 1956, with additional expansions in 1983 and 1999. The original upstairs theatre is now used for rehearsals where an alleged ghost haunts the dressing room and stage.

“I auditioned for my first piece at the NVT on a gorgeous day in spring 2007. The audition was held upstairs in the old theatre, it smelt of old velvet seating and the pages from a thousand scripts. It seemed to contain the majority of Brighton’s dust—in which you could see actual footprints on the stage floor. The director Mark Wilson was sat there in the gloom of the front row as I entered the stage to audition under Nature’s own followspot: a shaft of dusty sunlight angled down from one of the theatre’s old skylight windows.”