Three years ago in Edinburgh, Ursula Martinez presented a brilliant show that stripped bare her relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other. This latest performance strips bare Martinez herself.
If it is not so interesting, that is not because Martinez's new work is any less quirky or entertaining than her last show. It is simply because part of the appeal of A Family Outing was that we all have families, and the dysfunction of Martinez's seemed to be in some way universal. Show Off - part of the British Festival of Visual Theatre - suffers from the fact that it is about Ursula Martinez and, although she is very interesting, we are not all Ursula Martinez.
In fact the question of who the real Ursula Martinez is, is at the core of the piece - in which the illusion of theatre and the images of ourselves that we present for public consumption collide and explode. Is the Ursula Martinez who makes solo work about her life the same Ursula Martinez as the one who walks down a street? Is she how she is because she is a performer or did she become a performer because of how she is?
Similar questions occupied many of the long dull years of my adolescence. Although Martinez's show does not really rise above that level of teenage philosophical inquiry, it is all done with such wit that it somehow seems more substantial than it really is.
The body of the show, which lasts about five minutes, consists of Martinez performing a striptease while doing a conjuring trick with a hanky that miraculously keeps disappearing and reappearing out of the next garment to be discarded. When she is stark naked, the hanky appears from out of her vagina. Martinez proceeds to answer a series of after-show questions. These go along the lines of: "How difficult is it to play yourself?" (answer: "What I find most difficult is to imitate my own accent") and "What are the politics in your show?" (answer: "Ah, I knew I'd forgotten to put something in. I had a checklist").
It would be very easy for the piece to become merely irritating, but Martinez's (carefully contrived) persona is so engaging and she has so much theatrical trickery up her sleeve that it is impossible not to want the real Ursula Martinez to stand up for rather longer than just an hour.
