Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Sarah Roberts: Scary Movie 7
Salam & Holohan
Genre: Comedy, Solo Show, Stand-Up
Venue: Monkey Barrel 2 at Monkey Barrel Comedy
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Sarah Roberts locks the room and takes us on an hour-long, hilarious ride about how disappointing her life has been. She’s never gotten over anything, and now we know what all of those things are.
Review
Roberts enters the room in a black hooded cloak with large chains hanging around her neck. She reaches the stage, the lights turn on, and the ghost disappears. Turns out, she’s not a scary person at all, she’s just a sweet, innocent soul who wants to lock us in the room with her so that we can always be together.
Sarah’s set is largely about looking for love and connection, with a focus on how many times she’s messed up in this journey. The perfectly timed gunshot sounds that accompany moments when she realises the stupidity of her actions were some of my favourite moments in the show. She merges this innocent search for connection with the grotesque act of eating her twin, and manages to create a strange soup of different kinds of comedy.
Sarah’s writing is brilliant, filled with great punchlines, callbacks, running gags, physical comedy, audience interaction and a very grotesque reveal. She’s playful, loveable and very clever. She is also very confident in her presence, and doesn’t seem to mind being taken away from her script by an audience member during an interaction. She does so easily, finds a hilarious ending to the interaction and seamlessly segues back into her set.
Stand-up comedy is increasingly making space for character comedy and Sarah shows us how it’s done. It’s a great choice to pretend to be a ghost while doing a stand-up set, it makes the story bigger than just that of Sarah’s. She also adds great observations about the kinds of people that the ghost encounters in the Scary Movie series, which adds great value to this set. I do enjoy this evolution of stand-up comedy. Masking up and using one’s physicality in comedy brings about many more layers of depth, helps the artist to play more while feeling less exposed, and brings about the humour that exists in liminal spaces.
Sarah Roberts’ Scary Movie 7 is amongst the many shows that explore the theme of looking for love, and this might be my favourite version of that theme. Not only did it leave me feeling joyous and tired of laughing, it also made me feel warm, light and strangely disturbed.
