WATCH: Gabriella Leonardi promises an extremely disappointing birthday at the Brighton Fringe

For the show, Gabriella invites you to what she promises will be an extremely disappointing birthday party to witness and celebrate all things life, plus the rubbish that comes with it and the journey of a damaged soul growing up. Shows are May 13, 4.30pm; May 14, 4.30pm; May 27, 2.30pm; and May 28, 12.30pm at Caravanserai Brighton: Junk Poets.

There will be cake, party bags full of sadness, bad dance moves that make your spine shiver, a lot of crying in the mirror and a whole lot of trauma behind closed doors, she says.

“It is based on my two poetry books which went very well. They both went to number one in women's poetry and British Irish poetry. I wrote them during lockdown. My main career is acting and so I thought that I would now bring the two things together and create a one-woman show based on those books of poetry.

“It's about my life. I decided not to change my name. It's about a damaged soul growing up. I was the eldest sibling and I looked after my siblings as I grew up as my mother was a single mother. I had big big dreams of being an actor and we ended up managing to send me to drama school but when I started drama school I got scouted for modelling. I was very young. I was not signed up. And I encountered many dangerous experiences with photographers. I went through a lot of sexual assault and a lot of trauma.

“I got some therapy. And it helps a bit but I realised that my main way of dealing with it and healing was to write the poetry but it was not the kind of poetry that I learned at school. It's more of a diary entry I ended up writing. And I wrote a lot and it ended up as The Art of a Damaged Soul and it was great because people liked the very unique way that I was writing and how I was highlighting how I've healed but it was also speaking about how I felt at the time. You never fully truly heal but that's OK. You can find ways to lead your life and to control your future, but there was a long time in my life where I thought that my past was so heavy and that I didn't have a future and that I wasn't lovable and that I couldn't trust anyone. But I realised that you don't have to fully heal from trauma to be able to get on with life and to take back control. You're never going to be 100 per cent and that's the point of the show. And I have now got the album. A lot of people liked it when I read my poems out loud at festivals and whatever, and they said that it meant so much more when they could hear my own voice and that I connected with it so much more and so I created a spoken word album that has just come out.”

All of which now combines in the show: “It’s me growing up over the years. Without giving away too much I show how growing up with not much money I always wished for the toys and then the material things and the latest phones and the latest fashions but what I was actually lacking and what I was actually wanting was true community and true friendship.”