Ursula Martinez

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.

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.

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.

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'.

'[6] 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'.

'[11] 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'.

[13] 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.

[15] In the show, she talked about social media, feminism, anal hygiene, the playground racism of 1970s singing games, her father's death in hospital and the failing NHS, and her mother's escape from the Spanish Civil War as a three-year-old.

Gradually things take an urgent and darker tone, the laughter still bubbles but more uneasily as the wall rises and Martinez's words are lobbed over the top like unpinned grenades primed to explode.'.

[18] Martinez has said that the show's starting point was her realisation that 'the word sometimes reinforces the idea that there is no absolute truth … that life isn’t fixed … that we are all prone to contradiction and all capable of change.

'[19] In Wild Bore (2017), Martinez collaborated with two comedians, Zoë Coombs Marr, and Adrienne Truscott, to probe the culture of arts critics.

She was a mentor to the visual and performance artist Victoria Melody, helping her create her first theatre show, Northern Soul, in 2012.

Reviewing Contra, Dorothy Max Prior found 'evidence of Ursula in the comic timing, the facial expressions, and – especially – in that little mouth-half-open, twinkly-eyed pause before the killer line.

'[21] In The Sydney Morning Herald's review of Bitch on Heat, Cameron Woodhead wrote that 'It was no surprise to discover British luminary Ursula Martinez directed the show.

Bitch on Heat doesn't waste a single moment, possesses a rare sense of completeness and condenses Shelton's genius for performance art into stage magic – a lucid dream fuelled by a transfixing combination of fierce intellect, intense presence and bold, often acidic, physical comedy.

Renamed C'est Duckie, it subsequently toured to Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Sydney, Berlin, Tokyo, Kyoto and New York.