Review by Steve Bennett

This has to be a first: comedy combined with bricklaying.

As Ursula Martinez delivers a series of pithy lines, she trowels down the mortar and starts building a breeze-block wall between herself and the audience. The more she reveals about herself, the more she literally hides away.

However the full extent of this simple but effective metaphor only becomes apparent later, when the edifice is complete. Then she can project anything she chooses on to the wall as she hides naked, behind it, a clear parallel with the online world, the image created by tagged photos and carefully chosen selfies no indicator of the person beneath them.

The device is a elegant theatrical flourish, increasingly focussing attention on the aphorisms and personal revelations that gradually expose more about her. The big themes prevalent in a lot of comedy are here: the death of a parent, feminism and online abuse, but she mixes the trivial with the massive injustices, getting as angry with the subjugation of women as she does with the problems of logging into a website or the word ‘anyhoo…’

‘Sometimes, I…’ is how each thought begins; an acknowledgement that everyone’s priorities and concerns are ever-shifting. Acknowledging the gear changes doesn’t always ease them, though, and some of the more obvious political points seem shoehorned in.

Yet she is touching and poignant on the death of her proudly perverted father, apparently caused by a lack of nursing attention on an NHS ward, and compelling on the stories of her family living amid the Spanish civil war, a subject she could have delved deeper insight.

Sometimes she explores her relationship; sometimes she is confessional with a ‘free admission’ about her character; sometimes she ’hits the head of the nail’ with a perfect summation of a hypocrisy; sometimes it’s just a witty universal observation. Sometimes she’s very funny; sometimes she spouts incontrovertible slogans; and sometimes it’s personal – sometimes into the realm of ‘too much information’.

The unique presentation is what makes a show of Free Admission, but the writing is generally skilled, too: the bricks of each statement building up to give a full picture of her – or at least the one she wants us to see. And that is one of an amusing, engaged and flawed human being.

Review date: 11 Feb 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Soho Theatre