Belly Scratch

Belly Scratch nights will feature 4 artists, each performing or reading up to 20 minutes of a new piece of work. You, the audience, are encouraged to share your thoughts via a digital feedback form after each performance, providing invaluable feedback on the work that could influence its future direction.

Blossom
Andrea and Blossom are national treasures. For the last ten years, their freestyle dog act has warmed the hearts of the British public. Not a day goes by without them attracting attention; both universally beloved online by their devoted fanbase and doted on in-person by kind strangers. Not a single day in the last ten years. But Andrea has reached her absolute last straw… 

One fateful morning launches the dog influencer into an uncontrollable spiral as she confronts the extent to which her identity and ambitions have been consumed by her career, coming to the fatal conclusion that all her woes are personified in her dog and ‘fellow business partner’, Blossom.

Andrea presses play on a livestream, ‘rightfully’ demanding reparations for all her years of labour or else… 

This dark comedy explores the detriments of capitalism, the all-consuming nature of anger and how some really favour the well-being of animals over human beings.

Gerline Ndombasi is a writer, facilitator and theatre producer from South London who relishes engaging with stories that dissect the messy intricacies of the world around us. She’s an alumni of the London Library’s Emerging Writers 2021/22 programme, The Old Vic’s Theatre Makers 2024/25 programme, Soho Theatre’s Writers Lab 2023/24 and current participant of its alumni 2025/26 cohort group. Her short plays have been shown in theatres across London such as Theatre503, Theatre Peckham and Union Theatre.

Causa
A Peruvian immigrant faces charges and deportation at a London court for accidentally causing a UK-wide agricultural crisis after growing a bootleg crop of a forbidden potato variety to cook a cherished dish from home to cure her homesickness and appease her cravings.

Under absurd cross-examination and defended by a sub-par barrister, Juana fights to be acquitted, hindered and aided by an odd parade of witnesses: an egotistical restauranteur, a drug-dealer come potato seed smuggler, a pissed-off neighbour, and a catastrophising scientific expert.

As the trial unfolds, questions mount: did her potato cause the crisis or is she just a convenient scapegoat? Should she be deported? Should this new potato, and Juana, be embraced as one of us?

Director: Cameron Krogh Stone

Cast: Betsy Loza, Cameron Krogh Stone, Tristan Pretty, Sammy Attalah, Lara Vivone

Raquel Bartra is a Peruvian writer, comedian, musician, and producer based in London. With a background in film, her work across theatre and music reaches for a cinematic sensibility, combining comedy, spectacle, and emotional intensity to explore the absurdity of the systems, political, social, and otherwise, that shape how we behave and what we believe. Her short play Devolved premiered at Short & Mighty, a micro-theatre night at Instituto Cervantes, asking what happens to power when no one understands the system holding it up.

how to EAT a guy in 10 days 
how to EAT a guy in 10 days is a comedy about a young journalist who begins writing an article on cannibalism to save herself from being fired and slowly spirals into testing the limits of the act itself.

Cannibalism is all the rage! And why wouldn’t it be? It’s a perfect metaphor for love, desire, and the never-ending appetite of capitalism. As the journalist digs into her research she discovers she might be willing to do anything to save her job, her vision of herself as a literary it-girl, and maybe even stumble into the most warped, all-consuming love story she never saw coming.

Amal Abdi is a London-based writer for stage and screen, drawn to bold, genre-blending storytelling. Her work leans into the absurd to reveal deeper emotional and social truths. Her first full-length play, Desperate Times (2023), produced by Side eYe Productions, had four sold-out London runs at venues including Rich Mix and the Pleasance Theatre, and went on a sold-out UK tour in 2024. Amal’s theatre debut came at 19, when her monologue ‘Hijabi Spiderman’ was selected for Bush Theatre’s Hijabi Monologues (2017).

Three For A Girl 
A woman defies her cursed ovaries and gets pregnant – but how do you keep a baby safe (and alive?) when you’re the unluckiest woman in the world?

(Genuine question – suggestions welcome please and thanks.)

According to what is known, 20% of us human beings consider ourselves to be unlucky. Including Nelly – like her mother before her…. and her mother’s mother before her. If misfortune is genetic (spoiler: it is) then Nelly’s blood is full of the stuff. But luckily, there’s magpies (two for joy), lucky pennies, mantras – and even lucky homemade jellies to protect her. Til she gets pregnant. And now nothing feels like it will be lucky enough.

Three for a Girl is a wholehearted tummy punch of a tale; exploring the stories we’re told (or, those we tell ourselves) and the fear these stories breed in our bellies. It examines life’s biggest lottery of all – fertility, and asks how can we humans have faith in anything?

How – in a world of death, of loss, of suicide, of failure, of bad hair days and of stubbing our toes – do we keep hope alive and trust that maybe, we might just be alright in the end?

Jo Hartland is an actor hailing from Croydon. Her acting credits include Casualty (BBC) EastEnders (BBC), Mike(Berlinale/Palm Springs), Pleasance, The Criterion, Royal Court Theatre, Southwark Playhouse and Assembly Edinburgh.

As a writer, her first short film Lily’s House recently won Best UK Short 2026 at the London Independent Film Festival. She also made the quarterfinals for the Female Pilot Club’s Comedy Initiative 2025.

Three for a Girl is her debut stage play as a solo artist.