Apples and Pears Scratch Night

Emma and her girlfriend want a baby. Emma wants her best friend Luke to be the donor. Will Luke agree? And what happens when a lifelong manchild suddenly decides he wants to be a dad?  ‘We Can Make It If We Try’ explores friendship and family in the spaces where the straight and the queer worlds collide.  

What's the Story Productions are a brand new Bristol-based company producing original work for theatre. Artistic Director Vicky Lane also produces and hosts the Queer Stories spoken word community event and Lip Service, a female and queer led comedy open mic.

Sugarcane and Concrete is an interactive solo theatre performance that blends storytelling, humour, music and audience participation to explore what it truly means to belong. Inspired by Rene Karen Katiisa's journey from a childhood in Kampala, Uganda, to South London and beyond, the play follows one woman as she unpacks the memories, identities and expectations that have shaped her life. 

Throughout the performance, audience members become the people who populate Rene's memories—a chauffeur, a headteacher, a nun, a shopkeeper, a midwife, friends and family—transforming the audience from observers into collaborators in reconstructing her story. Moving seamlessly between comedy and reflection, the play explores migration, family, motherhood, class, race and identity, while celebrating Black joy, resilience and the universal search for home. Rather than asking where we belong, the play asks a more profound question:  “How many versions of ourselves do we create before we finally choose ourselves?” 

Rene Karen Katiisa is a Ugandan-born theatre-maker, actor, writer and cultural producer based in Bristol. After training at The BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology and graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, due to facing barriers in the industry, she spent over twenty years leading education, participation and cultural programmes before returning to her creative practice in 2025. Rene is the founder and host of The Library Podcast, a platform celebrating Black and Global Majority artists through conversation and storytelling. She was selected for Bristol Old Vic's Decolonising Disability programme and Black South West Network's CultureBiz Connect programme, where she first performed Sugarcane and Concrete.

These are not your average monks.  For two years, Brother Facetious and his four "brothers" have been squatting in an abandoned monastery, living off government funding and burning through it on drink, drugs, gambling, and every other sin in the book. No prayers, no discipline, no consequences, just an endless party disguised as devotion.  Then five very real nuns turn up. Led by the razor-sharp Mother Superior, they're suspicious from the moment they walk through the door and they're not going anywhere. So they set the "monks" a series of trials, determined to expose the truth.  

The Blank Slate Ensemble are a theatre company established by creatives from Bath and Chipping Sodbury, with many graduates of Bath Spa’s BA Acting course. Our collective vision is to make theatre that entertains, allows audiences to escape into it, and share the joy of the ensemble. We are committed to creating original plays as an ensemble, through a mixture of scriptwork and devising, to tell stories that haven’t been heard or that need to be! We like to challenge existing genres and push the boundaries of theatre, even if it’s just about making everything a little bit more silly! 

In 2024, we took our original show Sardines to the Edinburgh Fringe where we received critical acclaim. From there we began to develop Holy Baloney, a night of original comedy that is different for every new audience, a hallmark of our devising and rehearsal process.