How A Little Princess shaped Sarah Roberts' standup career
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- Sarah Roberts performed standup for the first time at age 28 at an open-mic audience-judged competition, winning a tiny gold trophy and quitting her job the following day
- A Little Princess (the film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's boarding-school story) shaped Roberts' self-belief from age eight, with protagonist Sara inspiring her to want to 'tell stories that make people gather round me'
- The film's Sara refuses to abandon her princess identity even after being forced into the attic as a servant girl, imagining a feast that materializes the next morning as real platters of sausages, muffins and fresh fruit — a dynamic Roberts labels 'delusion as strategy'
- Roberts has now performed standup consistently for five years and frames bombing on stage as essential to improvement, writing that 'you don't get better if you don't bomb'
- Roberts is performing her show Scary Movie 7 at Monkey Barrel 2 in Edinburgh through 30 August
Why it matters: The piece rebrands 'delusion' as deliberate creative strategy rather than a clinical or pejorative term — a useful lens for anyone weighing a high-risk career pivot. Roberts casts Sara from A Little Princess as a standup archetype: someone whose unshakeable self-belief survives humiliation and ultimately bends reality around her. The 28-year-old open-mic win became the pivot from a nine-to-five email job to a five-year comedy career now playing the Edinburgh Fringe.
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