In an interview in the Guardian last week, Ursula Martinez revealed that her show A Family Outing, the opening section in the trilogy Me Me Me!, transformed her into a "successful artist who pays a lot of tax". It's clear why: a piece investigating normality, nature versus nurture, love and family ties, it pits Martinez against her "annoying, embarrassing" parents in ways that are clever and witty and make you think about your relationship with your own parents, and their relationship with each other.
Although the show is scripted, it never feels it: you can imagine the old couple bickering away at home just as they do here. There is sadness in the family's recognition that they can live neither with nor without each other, yet there is something celebratory, too. In a brief, joke-filled hour, Martinez has managed to capture four decades' worth of familial muddling and surviving.
While A Family Outing is the most affecting show in the trilogy, its companions - Show Off and OAP - are no less sly in their manipulations of fact and fiction, and no less amusing. In Show Off, Martinez peels away layers both literal and metaphorical to find out whether she presents her "real" self on stage, and whether such a thing even exists. She may be self-absorbed, but Martinez tilts her mirror so that it reflects the entire audience, showing us the masks we ourselves adopt in daily life, and how easily we confuse nakedness with truth.
OAP addresses Martinez's fear of getting old - of "saggy tits and a bony old arse", of losing her independence, of never knowing when to shut up. Her filmed interviews with pensioners from Morecambe are hilarious and agonising to watch; so is her transformation into a doddering old woman disappointed by what a "tosser" she was in her youth. Martinez's message - laced through all three shows - is a soppy one: life is too short to waste in beating yourself up, so learn to accept and love yourself instead. But it's delivered with such acerbic, self-deprecating humour that it never feels sentimental.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0845 120 7500.
