Ursula Martinez

Ursula Martinez (born 1966) is a British theatre maker, performer and director.

She grew up in South London, the daughter of an English father and Spanish mother, both teachers.

After graduating in French and Theatre at Lancaster University, she began performing cabaret turns on London's club circuit, in particular the iconic queer performance club, Duckie.

After much success as a cabaret performer, Martinez went on to create theatre shows, both solo and collaborative.

Three shows in which she starred, C'Est Duckie, La Clique and La Soirée, have won Olivier awards.

In one of her early cabaret acts, Viva Croydon, Martinez drew on her Anglo-Spanish heritage to create 'a flamenco skit on the joys of South London multiculturalism, where Cordoba meets Cor Blimey.'

Martinez followed Viva Croydon with her most famous act, Hanky Panky.

Combining magic with striptease, Martinez repeatedly makes a red handkerchief vanish and re-appear from an item of clothing, which is then removed until she is naked.

Hanky Panky was described in the Daily Telegraph as 'one of the most inventive striptease routines ever devised'.

Martinez's first theatre show was A Family Outing in 1998, co-written with and directed by Mark Whitelaw.

In this personal, autobiographical show, Martinez 'unpicked family life, myths and relationships with the help of her Mum and Dad who appeared alongside her on stage'.

In The Guardian, Lyn Gardner wrote that the show was 'a seemingly improvised but cunningly orchestrated psychodrama about the pleasures, pains and embarrassments of family relationships in a format that is part game show, part Jerry Springer and part family photo album'.

In The Independent, Maggie O'Farrell described the A Family Outing as 'hilarious, devilish and brilliant: Martinez has, if you like created a new theatrical genre.'

Collaborating again with director Mark Whitelaw, Martinez's second theatre piece Show Off (2000), examined 'the myth of celebrity and ... the notion of identity and the performing ego, both on and off stage'.

In 2003 Martinez and Whitelaw created OAP which confronted Martinez's fear of ageing.

The publicity read: 'Single, childless and fast approaching 40, Martinez anticipates a sad and lonely old age.

Will she become a wise and respected old sage, or a dreary old hag who goes on and on about how she used to be a cutting edge performance artist.'

The act brought Martinez international notoriety after she performed it in La Clique in the Famous Spiegeltent during Edinburgh Fringe in 2004.

After attending a performance, Maureen Lipman wrote in the Guardian: 'I couldn't imagine that removing a jacket, skirt and underwear with a bolshie attitude could be that empowering.

She...finished by removing it from a place that brought howls of appreciation from every corner of the roundest of venues.

Like Gypsy Rose before her, Ms Martinez had the last laugh on generations of the exploitations of her sex.'

In 2006 a recording of the act was illicitly posted online and overnight became a viral sensation.

It has since been viewed by millions of people all over the world, and is still in circulation over a decade later.

In 2006 Martinez performed A Family Outing, Show Off and OAP at the Barbican as a trilogy of autobiographical work entitled Me Me Me! Lyn Gardner described the trilogy as 'highly complex investigations into reality and fiction, autobiography and lies, and the nature of identity itself, her own most of all.'

When Martinez’ Hanky Panky routine went viral on the internet in late 2006, she received thousands of emails from all over the world.

Primarily from men, some of the emails were inappropriately intimate, lustful and/or derogatory.

Soon after, interviewed in The Guardian, Martinez said: 'What I do is the complete opposite of a traditional striptease.

Put it on the internet, where it can be viewed at the click of a button, it becomes something else entirely.

I feel that I've lost control of something whose power and impact came entirely from the fact I was in control.'

Martinez's initial reaction was to avoid reading the emails.

She told an Australian interviewer, 'Once I calmed down about it, I opened the Pandora's box of emails and I thought, this is amazing material, this is amazing insight into the world at large and the internet and virtual relationships and the delusion of internet relationships.'

Commissioned by The Barbican in 2008, Martinez and fellow Duckie artist, Chris Green, created the award-winning Office Party.

This was 'a huge piece of experiential theatre....the ultimate night out where you take part in the annual bash of a fictional company.' The show was originally directed by Cal McCrystal and subsequently co-directed by Martinez and Green for its post-Edinburgh London transfer.

In 2009, La Clique won the Olivier award for Best Entertainment.

Accepting the award, Brett Haylock, La Clique's creative producer, said 'Who could have ever imagined that a show that involved a woman pulling a hankie out of her vagina would ever win an Olivier Award.''

In 2010, Martinez and Whitelaw created My Stories, Your Emails, a theatre piece about 'public perception and personal identity and the gulf between the two – about how a five-minute, silent performance can acquire a life of its own'.

It was in two halves.

The first half, My Stories, revealed Martinez's 'representation of herself from her own point of view.

They feature what family have said to her, things she remembers, essentially those stories that we all have inside of us'.

After showing the video of Hanky Panky, Martinez then read out a selection of the emails, using different accents to convey the character she imagined for each correspondent.