Belly Scratch

Belly Scratch is Underbelly Boulevard Soho’s first ever theatre scratch night!

Discover exciting and bold new pieces in their early stages, from both new and established theatre-makers! We’re providing a regular safe space for theatre-makers to test out never-performed extracts of their work and receive feedback from a receptive audience. Belly Scratch nights will feature 4 artists each performing or reading up to 20 minutes of a new piece of work, and audience members will have access to a feedback form after watching, providing an opportunity to offer new ideas and thoughts on the work and influence its future direction.

Excerpts of the following shows will be performed at this month’s Belly Scratch:

Baby You Are Paperwork

He Zhang is an interdisciplinary theatre maker whose practice spans directing, performing, dramaturgy, and video design. His work explores the delicate boundaries between media and language, often blurring the line between live and mediated performance. He has created and presented work in the UK, the US, and China, and is an integral member of Ensemble Not Found.

Baby You Are Paperwork is a one-person, interactive lecture-performance about visa systems, migration, and the absurd theatre of border control. Framed as a surreal audition, a struggling theatre director attempts to cast, live on stage, the creative team for his painfully boring show — about visa paperwork.

Drawing from real (and not-so-real) visa stories, the piece weaves personal encounters with historical archives (mostly factual, but who’s checking?) and speculative futures. Casting call meets visa interview, bureaucracy meets performance, fiction and truth dissolve into each other. Who gets to belong? Who decides what’s “official?” What happens when identity becomes admin?

Through playful provocation and candid intimacy, Baby You Are Paperwork probes the power dynamics of legality, documentation, and the fragile performances we give to be seen, accepted, or let in.

Normal Men

Sam Macgregor is a writer and actor whose latest play (Hold the Line) had a sell out run at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe with rave reviews. Prior to this, his debut play (Truly, Madly, Baldy) premiered at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe and then transferred to Laurels theatre in North Tyneside (to a lovely 5* review). Sam mainly writes from his own personal experiences (Alopecia and working for NHS 111) and is very happy to end 2025 performing his latest piece for the first time at such an exciting venue!

Carlos Sandin is a multi-disciplinary performer and director whose experience ranges from clowning and sketch comedy to playing the clarinet. This summer also saw Carlos at the Edinburgh Fringe with his hilarious 5* show Pull My Gold Finger. 

Normal Men explores the rollercoaster career of a children’s TV presenter called Mark Barker. The scenes we see will show us the ups and downs of his career, working alongside his puppet/mascot Turtle. We see him interact with the puppet in one scene, and then in another scene, a raw and intense interview after he has been sacked by the BBC. The character of Mark Barker is an amalgamation of former Blue Peter presenters Matt Baker and Richard Bacon, as well as CBBC Smart presenter Mark Speight. Normal Men will look into the darker side of being a children’s TV presenter and how one’s personal life can lead to career highs and severe lows.

@samhazamacg (Instagram)

@carlossandin (Instagram)

Watershed

Lauren Sudworth is a writer living and working between London and Norwich, where she’s studying for an MA in Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia. She is also a writer and researcher for hit US history podcast, ‘American Scandal’. Her historical comedy TV pilot, CLOISTERED was a semi-finalist in the 2025 Roadmap Writer’s Jumpstart competition. This is her first play.

Watershed is a 20-minute speculative play set in a near future where trauma survivors can choose to live out their lives inside their happiest memories. At the Watershed Clinic, every patient exists within a looping reconstruction of their “safest” moment, cut off from the pain that followed. To solve a case, a dogged detective must compel the victim of a violent crime to relive a traumatic memory that technology has allowed her to forget. But the detective’s commitment to the case forces her to confront an unbearable memory of her own. The play asks what healing from trauma looks like in a world where suffering can be forgotten—and whether forgetting is an act of freedom or surrender.

Beckis Cooper: @thecooperrrr

Lottie Oldham: @lottielouisa

Merlin Stevens @northlandsteve

Lauren Sudworth: @laurensudworth

Goodbye Dandelion

Maddie Rice is a writer performer interested in making female led work examining taboo topics with depth and humour. She has a background in theatre and sketch comedy and her first play, Pickle Jar, premiered at Underbelly in Edinburgh and won the Three Weeks award before transferring to Soho Theatre. She also works as an actress in TV, Theatre and film. TV credits include Fleabag, Stath Let’s Flats, The Other One. And on the stage: 39 Steps, Fleabag, Pickle Jar, All My Sons (Regents Park), Henry V (West End).

Marcus Rice is a composer and sound designer who’s worked with lots of great people to create original music and sound design for animation, film, tv, theatre, ads and podcast. Check out more at hungrytapes.com.

Goodbye Dandelion is a brand-new project, and this is its first outing. It is a formally inventive two hander performed by Maddie Rice, with original songs by Marcus Rice. It tells the story of 36-year-old Nell and 86-year-old Darcy, their unlikely friendship and the way Darcy has decided to die: today, via illegal means. Nell is terrified of death and is prepared to do anything it takes to keep her perfectly healthy hero around. 

Using storytelling, songs, foley and humour, the play tackles the knotty subject of assisted dying and asks us all to think about the way we see and deal with old age in the Western world. 

@ricemad

@hungrytapes

@marcusrrrice