Review: Free Admission

For someone who spends hours in front of a crowd laying bricks for her latest show Free Admission, cabaret extraordinaire and nudist auteur Ursula Martinez is not so great at keeping up walls.

The ‘prelude’ to her performance, which she insists “isn’t part of the performance…but it is really isn’t it?”, is the reassurance that even though she wanted to collate the personal details and Facebook stalk “the shit” out of her audience – to keep them on edge with, for instance, excerpts of their ex’s status updates – she couldn’t. General customer protection laws have regrettably prevented her, and so she resorted to gathering government health service statistics that apply to any crowd of 70. These, of course, include how many will die in the next 18 months, and how many have a verruca.

The show starts measurably casually; as a grinning Martinez begins slopping wet concrete down on the shelf, the scene is reminiscent of a friendly natter with a local builder or chatty barista.

Formal introductions aside, the show properly begins. Ursula retreats behind a blackout wall with a 2-meter long gap, at a height from the upper-thigh to the head. The show starts measurably casually; as a grinning Martinez begins slopping wet concrete down on the shelf, the scene is reminiscent of a friendly natter with a local builder or chatty barista. The backbone of the performance is the anaphoric “sometimes…” which serves as a springboard for a ludicrously diverse range of ruminations ranging from the profound (“sometimes I get just as pissed off by the inconsequentialities of everyday life as I do about the massive injustices of the world, and that pisses me off”) to the banal and grotesque (Martinez has the obsessive tendency of making sure her derrière is clean even though she “doesn’t take it up the shitter…regularly”).

One of the hardest parts of the show, she later states in a Q&A, was learning to brick-lay and remembering all her lines, both of which she now carries out nonchalantly, if a little offhand, making the whole thing look like a breeze (pun intended).

Martinez plays tonal whiplash with us, oscillating between humour, disgust, pathos and stunned silence – denying the audience any comfort.

As the physical walls build higher and higher, Martinez’s verbal expulsions, despite their humour and penny-drop awkwardness, become more and more painfully honest and human. She covers isolation in the age of social media (in which she gets jealous of all the fun her past Facebook self seems to be having) as well as the very bourgeois, middle class reality of her life concerns (she wants to be a good friend and do yoga… but it’s just much easier to retweet a Chinese proverb). Moments such as when she relates the passing of her late father and the ensuing legal battle due to negligence in an overstaffed NHS ward, underscored by an unexpected use of sombre music, come to reach real tragedy.

Where the piece really excels is in its manipulation of these emotions in the audience. Martinez plays tonal whiplash with us, oscillating between humour, disgust, pathos and stunned silence – denying the audience any comfort, expectation or indulgence (as we begin to realise that’s truly what it is) in our own emotions. She relates her request for the house lights to always be turned up a little, so she in turn can observe and suss out the audience as we do, her. It may be “free admission”, with a stress on her own personal admissions, but it comes solely on Martinez’s terms. Nothing rams this home than the grand finale, when, DIY complete, we can safely say some unsuspecting Warwick students in the outside foyer see a lot more female flesh than anticipated on an chilly Wednesday evening.

The ones who feel intimidated, challenged, and perhaps a little vulnerable, are ourselves.

Perhaps the strongest feeling leaving the room is one of being duped – how the hell has Martinez confessed and stripped (literally and metaphorically) herself of all pretensions, and yet the ones who feel intimidated, challenged, and perhaps a little vulnerable, are ourselves?