In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point.
Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease routine with a red hanky was put on the internet without her knowledge, and went viral. This show, first performed in 2010, is her response to some of the more daft and disturbing “fan” mail she received as a result.
It opens with Martinez striding onto the stage while the house lights are still up. She’s wearing the grey skirt suit from her hanky video, but if you didn’t know that – and even if you do – she looks and sounds like nothing so much as the high-flying headteacher of some inner-city academy preparing to address the sixth form assembly: smart, professional, and highly unlikely to tolerate idiocy or accept lame excuses. After admonishing us about mobile phones and embarrassing a few latecomers as they trickle in, she faces the audience with a chummy smile and asks us why we are here. The interrogative glitter of her eyes provokes apprehension; if we are sixth-formers, now is when we begin to suspect the head is on the warpath about something and that we might be about to get a collective bollocking, or at least asked to “own up” to a misdemeanour. In fact it’s the latter, as Martinez, sweet but deadly, asks, “Who’s here for pervy reasons, then? Who’s here to see me get my kit off?”
There is a belly laugh payoff for every shudder or squirm
She’s a powerful stage presence – tall, twinkly, commanding – but anyone hoping for a reprise of the hanky routine is in for a disappointment: Martinez spends most of the show behind a lectern, glasses on the end of her nose, “reading” from a book or a laptop. In the first half it’s anecdotes from her life – or rather vignettes, one-line short stories as punchy as a haiku – and mostly of her childhood, that range from the absurd (a neighbour’s Hoovering exam) to the grotesque (Mars Bars meets cat poo). Comedy skates on thin ice over pathos (“When I found out that my father used to pay to have his bottom spanked, I was shocked at first... but then I got used to it”) but Martinez is a clever entertainer: there is a belly laugh payoff for every shudder or squirm, and the next anecdote is upon you before you’ve quite finished wondering whether you ought to be laughing at someone who’s just told you about being walloped by their dad (“and that was when I realised how different real life was from Little House on the Prairie”).
Martinez’s skill at being funny-but-discomfiting comes to the fore in the second half, in which she reads out emails from men who have seen her hanky video. Most are accompanied by pictures, and Martinez, adopting their accents, invites us to laugh: at tragic, soulful Brad from California, who always puts his phone number on his emails; at Sven the Swede who encloses his home-made Christmas cards from 15 years ago; at the nameless Brazilian who sends her 54 photos of himself, naked, doing household chores. But these are the tamer ones: for all of Caitlin Moran claims that burlesque is “not an easy wank”, there’s a subset of Martinez’s fans who not only overcome the difficulty but feel the need to tell her about it in graphic terms.
Yet as the parade of mugshots and emails continues, especially when Martinez (herself impeccably polite) enters into correspondence with an Australian whose expressions of loneliness and sexual frustration remind me of the Isla Vista shooter Elliott Rodgers, you begin to question who’s exploiting whom here. The calculation becomes even more complicated when Martinez reads out the emails of a chap who not only sends her pictures of his “19cm erect penis” but appears to get a kick out of having it featured in the show (yeah, did I mention you shouldn’t take the kids? Don’t take the kids). He’s having a wank, she’s exploiting him for a hit show, he’s wanking over that too, and we’re all sitting there laughing. Tricky.
I won’t spoil the end for you, but Martinez makes her point. In the context of the nasty and silly things people write to her, a fan’s assertion that “your show demonstrates that nudity can be free of embarrassment and degradation” rings hollow, but by the end Martinez has reclaimed the truth of that statement. Or rather, turned it around, by showing that the only people embarrassed and degraded by her striptease act are those who don’t realise that, at least when you’re talking about Ursula Martinez, the power always rests with the person taking their clothes off.
- Ursula Martinez: My Stories, Your Emails at the Purcell Room until 10 August as part of Southbank Centre's Festival of Love
