Julia RobertsJulia Roberts‘ Broadway debut has not gone down well with the critics.

The production of Three Days of Rain opened on Wednesday after several preview performances earlier in the month.

Julia plays two characters in the play: Nan in the first act, then Nan’s mother Lina in the second. The shift between the two characters was too much for some.

“Ms Roberts’s Nan may have been awkward, but her Lina borders on embarrassing,” commented the critic from the New York Sun. “Drifting in and out of Lina’s Southern accent, grasping at any ‘playable’ sign of mental illness, Ms Roberts works her way around the stage with the self-consciousness of a homecoming queen being forced to stand up and play BLANCHE DuBOIS in English class.”

The New York Times was more forgiving: “She’s stiff with self-consciousness, only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.”

Others thought the problems lay in the difference between acting on film and acting on the stage.

“As mesmerising as she is onscreen, she has surprisingly little stage presence,” said the New York Daily News while the Chicago Tribune described the problems more thoroughly: “Roberts’ orbit here feels so limited in range - and so lacking in oomph, projection and the necessary vocal support - that one has to repress an urge to jump up on stage, get close to that famous, wide-mouthed visage, and see precisely what she’s doing”.

Oh dear.