The title of Ursula Martinez’s latest show is both a great big whopper and the absolute truth. The audience must pay for a ticket, but Martinez undeniably bares her soul and body (this is an artist for whom the two are intimately connected). It clearly comes at a cost.
This solo show is funny, tongue-in-cheek, heartfelt and emotional – particularly in Martinez’s account of the death of her father, who joined her onstage in her 2006 show A Family Outing. Free Admission explores what is voiced and what goes unvoiced, the gaps between what we all think and say.
She makes her admissions while constructing a wall between her and us using breezeblocks and cement. It not only offers a hint of the confessional box (how much easier it is to confess when you cannot be seen), but it’s revealing too: the less visible she becomes, the more we see of her. The more we see of her, the more we see ourselves and our own anxieties, prejudices and absurdities, the way we have so little sense of scale.
It begins jokily with Martinez admitting some of her personal quirks and insecurities: how she has a bit of a thing about anal hygiene and how she sometimes gets jealous of Catherine Tate, with whom she once shared a stage. Almost every sentence begins with the words “Sometimes I …”, which gives her words a provisional quality and means they can hang in the air like inscrutable Chinese proverbs. Gradually things take an urgent and darker tone, the laughter still bubbles but more uneasily as the wall rises and Martinez’s words are lobbed over the top like unpinned grenades primed to explode.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 20 February. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
