Sarah Roberts pleased to be herself on debut stand-up tour - Brighton date

What happens when everything you thought you knew about yourself wasn’t true, she asks. In Silkworm, Sarah says she is finally committing to the person she's been told to hate the most: herself. As she enters her 30s, it’s time for Sarah to put to rest all the stories that she’s spun for herself and everyone else about who she is…

“I did the Edinburgh Fringe last year and now I'm taking the show on the road. I suppose the timing is a couple of things. I think firstly it's quite a small tour. It's not like a huge number of dates that I'm doing. I am just taking the show to places that I have really liked to perform at in the past. But I was also thinking about the changes I could make to the show to make it bigger. Really it's up to you. You can actually leave it as is but I feel that there are things that I would like to implement and I want also to inject some visual elements into the show now.”

As for Silkworm: “The central story in the show is about me being encouraged when I was a teenager to have double jaw surgery on the NHS. I had an overbite and I spent many years waiting to go through surgery for me to feel different, before I could become the full version of myself. In the show I'm looking at my younger self and really the focus is on womanhood. I look at the shows as a kind of anti-identity show. When you do a debut hour there is pressure on you to say ‘This is who I am’ but this is more about me realising all the things that I wasn't despite the expectations that I had on me to become them. It’s realisation that I'm really none of these things. The expectation was that surgery would make me look completely different and feel completely different. Whether it does or doesn't, I do invite the audience to decide.

“I'm 32 now and I spent my 20s seeking male attention and I only realised in my 30s that I was queer. I also grew up thinking that I was Native American. My dad has family in America and we were told that we were Native American. But I took the ancestry test and I found out that that was wrong. I don't know how that came about but we are not Native American. It was a surprise because I felt really connected to my Midwestern ancestry which just wasn't there! So the show is really about how we attach ourselves to different identities and why we do that and it's also about the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we tell other people about who we are.

“Now I feel that I just don't know. There is a freedom now like it does not hugely matter but especially when I was younger, I can remember identifying myself as a One Direction fan or as a Taylor Swift fan and that becoming a huge part of my identity, and I guess that's what the show is about.”

As for the success of the tour, Sarah says: “It's just about having fun. I do like interacting with the audiences and I'm really excited about meeting different audiences. I'm going to Brighton and Manchester and Edinburgh, places that I've already had nice experiences in and it's just about having fun and meeting people.”