Beyonce – Stop Punching Robbie! is about as subtle as the title suggests. As Janice, writer and actor Cecilia Delatori is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, with great blinking eyes, wobbling chin and a great mouth, down-turned at the corner, like a sad Pierrot clown face.

Delatori’s one-woman show, directed by Michael Eriera, explores the clash between the old and the new.

Janice, a nursery school teacher with 23 years’ experience, is battling all fronts.

Her marriage is crumbling, as her husband leaves her for a younger model he has met on an assertiveness training seminar. At work, her younger colleague Catherine sneers at her teaching practices, in a clash Janice describes as Mary Poppins meets Pol Pot.

Delatori, pictured, makes an interesting point about how vulnerable women, especially older women, are to the vagaries of a world fascinated by newer, flashier, shinier models.

The script doesn’t shy away from suggesting Janice's problems might be, to a degree, self-inflicted, as she isn’t an entirely sympathetic character. I certainly agreed with the suggestion made by Janice’s best friend, the nursery head, to pull herself together and get on with it.

The show is comprised of subtle moments among overblown pathos, where Janice allows us to get under the skin of her personal tragedy, that of a world that had ceased to value her.

When Delatori relinquishes the manic over-acting and stops trying to pull the audience in, she allows moments of inspired story-telling to speak for themselves.

Review by Catherine Marcus