Ursula Martinez interview: 'Part of me wants to take my clothes off less, but the political me resists that'
Twenty years ago Ursula Martinez persuaded her retired teacher parents to perform alongside her at the Edinburgh Fringe in A Family Outing, a show designed to “present real life on stage”. It was a hit, launching Martinez’s career as a theatre-maker and performance artist, and taking the family around the world to perform in cities including Vienna, Stockholm and Sydney.
A lot has changed since then. Martinez’s father has passed away, her mother was diagnosed with early-stage dementia and Martinez herself is now 52. Reviving the show to mark its 20th birthday, which she’s doing at the Barbican this month, felt like an opportunity to take stock.
“What happens in the course of 20 years, as an adult? Either you just get older, and you’re more or less the same. Or you get older and you’re not the same — presumably worse off, weaker or frailer or more vulnerable, less capable emotionally or mentally. Or you’re dead. Those are your three scenarios and I thought, ‘We’ve got those covered’.”
The absence of Martinez’s father “adds a poignancy to the proceedings”, she says, but A Family Outing: 20 Years On will be just as irreverent — and funny, Martinez hopes — as the show that inspired it, a loving exploration of ageing, family relationships and how the two interrelate.
It sounds like A Family Outing won’t be hampered by the condition of Martinez’s mother’s either. When she first broached the idea of reviving it the performer asked her mum if she was confident of remembering her lines. “‘God yes!’ Martinez says, putting on a thick Spanish accent. “‘I won’t remember what I had for breakfast but I remember my lines!’”
Humour, combined with an often disarming openness about her own life, have been central to Martinez’s theatre work since she made her debut with the first Family Outing all those years ago. Show Off, from 2001, explored ideas of celebrity and the ego of performance. OAP, from 2003, was a response to Martinez’s fear of growing old (her panic over turning 40 “feels ridiculous” now, she confesses). And My Stories, Your Emails (2010) and Free Admission (2016) both looked at the ways we make ourselves vulnerable in the internet age.
Martinez writes about herself, she says, because it’s what she knows best. “What I know about is being a human being and living on this planet and the difficulties and contradictions that it brings. I’m not going to make a show about Brexit because then I would have to do all the research and understand all the ins and outs of it and WHO CAN BE ARSED?!” she says. “Stick to what you know. Otherwise you could get into trouble because you could get it wrong. But I can’t get me wrong.”
Running alongside — and at times feeding directly into — Martinez’s career as a theatre-maker has been her long-standing presence on the international cabaret scene. It’s for this side of things that she’s probably better known, in fact. Her funny and subversive five-minute magic striptease Hanky Panky went viral in the mid-2000s after someone illegally filmed it and put it online (it was the bruising abuse she received as a result which inspired My Stories, Your Emails).
Cabaret gave the young Martinez, fresh out of a theatre degree at Lancaster University, the chance to “exercise that idea of making my own work in a very fast and immediate way”. She found a happy home with the queer performance art and cabaret collective Duckie — now an established community on the London scene, but which back then was starting to make a name for itself just like Martinez.
“I threw myself into that and got a good response immediately so I was able to carry on doing that to build up confidence and stage time, try out new things and try out spoken-word, which shifted me towards theatre,” she says. “Cabaret became a bit of a bridge.”
It has also provided Martinez with some financial stability over the years, from appearances with Olivier Award-winning variety extravaganza La Soirée (she was one of the founding cast members) to the inspired decision to franchise out the act that made her famous. The arrangement means she has been able to “pull away from” Hanky Panky yet still benefit from the fruits of her labour (“it’s like a musician getting royalties”). Plus, the act is still out there in the world for audiences to enjoy.
Even if Martinez isn’t still doing that particular striptease, it’s not like she’s suddenly got all prudish. The performer regards nudity as a useful metaphorical device — “for self-revelation, not hiding and being vulnerable” — on the one hand and as a statement of female empowerment on the other.
She has taken her kit off in most of her work (A Family Outing is an exception) and has no plans to stop doing so. On the contrary, getting naked on stage feels more important now than ever before.
“I’m 52 and there’s a part of me that wants to take my clothes off less. And then there’s the political me which totally resists that and says, ‘No! Now is when you have to keep going’. Or maybe it’s just that when I was younger and prettier I took my clothes off, and now that I’m older and less pretty I don’t.”
Martinez has never been one to take the easy way out. Though very grateful to have been able to make her living as an artist, she has always found the creative process itself challenging. “Sometimes if you hit on something it’s exciting and enjoyable,” she says. But then there’s the realisation of the lengths that she’ll need to go to or the vulnerable position she’ll need to put herself in to fulfil that creative impulse.
That might mean going on a bricklaying course, which she did so that she would be able to build a wall properly on stage during performances of Free Admission, or literally talking out of her arse in Wild Bore, a 2017 show that saw Martinez, along with fellow actors and comedians Zoë Coombs Marr and Adrienne Truscott, take on the critical establishment.
How about just trying something easier, I suggest, that perhaps doesn’t involve learning how to lay bricks? Martinez looks a bit puzzled: “If the idea’s good you don’t want to substitute it for a less good idea just because it’s less work.”
A Family Outing: 20 Years On is at the Barbican, EC2 (barbican.org.uk), from March 27-30
