Reclaim Festival: Scratch Night

Ever wondered how great performance really comes to life?

We’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s not just hours locked away writing or rehearsing. Sometimes artists need the spark of a real audience – the laughs, the gasps, the energy – to help shape their finest work. That’s where you come in.

Join a vibrant mix of local women-led theatre companies and performance artists for an eclectic, entertaining mash-up of fresh work-in-progress performances, focussed around women’s stories. This night is a crucial step for the artists and an unforgettable, left-field experience for the audience (that’s you!).

It might be hilarious. It might be messy. It might be tender, weird, brave or unexpectedly moving. And you might just leave feeling energised, joyful and hugely inspired.

A Scratch Night isn’t your typical evening out – it’s creative risk-taking at its finest, and you can be at the heart of it.

Katy Danbury (Exeter Phoenix Performance Programmer & Scratch Night Producer) and Sam Parker (Exeter Northcott’s Artist Development Producer) will be hosting a pre-Scratch gathering in the Barnfield Theatre foyer from 6pm, where we invite people to feedback on our current Scratch offer, suggest ideas on what you have seen work well elsewhere, and any other suggestions or thoughts you might have about the general artist development offer in Exeter.

Our Reclaim Festival 2026’s Scratch Night performers are as follows:

1. Conversations with Strangers by Suspension Theatre
   Woven from intimate conversations with strangers, this piece takes a taboo subject and flips it on its head. Sharp, funny and deeply human, we invite the audience to recognise themselves in the words of others, and perhaps reconsider the assumption that loneliness is something experienced alone. Structured in fragmented, non-linear chapters, some stories resurface while others remain unresolved, reflecting the fleeting and unpredictable nature of human relationships. Blending verbatim dialogue with physical storytelling, live and recorded sound, Suspension Theatre’s signature playful energy seamlessly shifts between topic, character and style, whilst always finding humour and absurdity in our most vulnerable moments.This theatrical collage of confession, contradiction and curiosity asks one simple question: if loneliness is something we all carry, how can we find connection within it?
2. 12 Pages In this piece in development, we follow part of a journey to uncover and understand the content of 12 pages of writing as the only ones salvaged from a book in draft by an ancestor now passed. It is a journey of snippets of time, conversation and imagination, mainly in spoken word.
   Beyond Face is a South West-based theatre company. We nurture the development of new theatrical ideas, invest in them, share them and tour our own work to stages across the country across 4 key strands. Our Storytell group sits within our Regional Voices strand and is made up of adults based in Exeter looking to explore their creativity. As part of this, we have given ‘Move it Forward’ commissions to several group members. This is a mixture of financial investment, dramaturgical support and mentorship. Reclaim Festival allocated a slot for a Beyond Face-supported artist to perform as part of this scratch and we are delighted to offer Safi the opportunity to share her work as part of this event.
3. Sea potatoes to the Stars by Naomi Hart
   Sea Potatoes to the Stars is a one-woman show about art, science and exploration. We join a cast of characters who take us on a journey from the bottom of the sea out to the stars, through time and space, meeting sea creatures that burrow in the mud and may be the answer to climate change, to the possible worlds of exoplanets, searching for life in other solar systems throughout the universe. What might we find? How can these stories help us find a way to live in this world, sharing it with all the incredible lifeforms that have been born from these stars? We’ll meet a sea captain in charge of a (real) 19th-century science expedition to the Antarctic, astronomers, sea worms, sea urchins and migrating birds in a show mixing movement, song and speech.
4. Ugly by Perdita Stott
   Two teenage girls turn humiliation into revolution in this defiant, darkly funny new play about beauty, shame, and the dangerous power of being seen. What begins as a school project quickly spirals into something far bigger. A flood of anonymous voices exposing the private wounds, rituals and quiet violences surrounding beauty, desire and girlhood. Ugly weaves together biting humour, lyrical confession and mythic undertones to question what happens when people stop hiding what they really feel about themselves… and each other?
5. Worse Water by Martha Orchard Set in a slightly worse present day, a couple haven’t paid their water bill in a long time. The water company suggests they switch to the newly introduced Economy Water Tier, a cheaper and ‘less filtered’ alternative to normal water. They’re told that it’s technically safe, but… surely it can’t be good? Will it slowly poison them? Are people doing this now? What will their friends think? Their own neurosis emerges as they deal with feeling powerless against big companies and the normalisation of bad things. Rory McLean plays Leo, Jasmine Perkins plays Janine.

This event is part of Reclaim Festival, our yearly celebration of women in the arts. Featuring brilliant new writing, not-so-new-but-also-brilliant writing, workshops, music and more, immerse yourself in locally sourced female greatness, to be enjoyed by everyone.

FULL RECLAIM PROGRAMME