Award-winning drag-theatre show KINDER arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 following a critically acclaimed run at Adelaide Fringe. Created and performed by Ryan Stewart, this genre-defying piece blends drag, storytelling, and theatre into a chaotic, heartfelt exploration of queerness, childhood, and censorship.
At the heart of KINDER is Goody Prostate, a drag-clown mistakenly booked for a children’s reading hour, who spirals into a poignant and hilarious meltdown. The show is both a personal reflection and a political statement, tackling the rising tide of reactionary politics with wit and vulnerability.
Catch KINDER at Underbelly Cowgate (Big Belly) from 31 July to 24 August 2025 (not 6th, 13th, or 20th) at 18:40. Tickets available here.
You’re starring in KINDER at Underbelly Cowgate – what can you tell us about the show?
I am indeed!
KINDER tells the story of the drag clown Goody Prostate, who has recently arrived in a new city and is about to make their big debut that night at their first gig in town. After grossly misinterpreting the nature of this gig, they realise they have less than an hour to throw together a new number and look, and the chaos ensues from there.
Goody spirals into a long-overdue examination of what it means to be a grown-up, how we should be looking after our children, the stories we tell ourselves, and the queerness we do or do not allow others to know.
This is the first work I’ve ever created, performed, and produced. After premiering at Melbourne Fringe last year to an incredible reception, and another wonderfully received season in Adelaide earlier this year, we’re making our international debut at Edinburgh Fringe this year at Underbelly!
KINDER blends drag, theatre, and storytelling. How did you develop this unique mix of genres?
Well, let’s start with the obvious: I was always a little bit of a theatrical kid (love that moniker; so loaded with euphemism), which after finishing school, led me into studying and training to develop a career in the performing arts. So theatre, and in particular meta-theatrical understandings of the form and its history, have always been a pivotal part of who I am as a person.
‘Drag’ folds into that meta-theatricality really interestingly. Whilst I have never particularly wanted to be a drag performer per se, I loved how the artform could still be used as its own stagecraft element to both build a character that is literally and figuratively cloaked in multiple layers of intrigue and obscurity, and also as a dramaturgical tool to highlight present-day societal anxieties.
Given the ideas I was interested in exploring in the work, it became very clear to me when I started conceiving the story that drawing on my own history and life to illustrate the themes Goody was trying to unpack was going to be an interesting way to imbue the narrative with a sort of grounded reality. I often talk about Goody as having the ability to talk about the things I don’t feel I can speak of as myself, so employing this biographical element in creating the show became another interesting way to play on those themes of artifice vs reality, and fiction from fact.
The show touches on themes of censorship, queerness, and childhood. What inspired you to explore these topics?
I think as many queer folks have been experiencing lately, the world has been feeling like an increasingly difficult place to move about safely in. The 2010s felt like a period we made great strides in as a community, marked particularly by things such as the large number of countries (including my own) who granted same-sex couples the right to marriage, and a process of normalisation (or that of being ‘homonormative’, as a very clever writer friend of mine put it) both in the way that same-sex attracted folks were able to conceive of ‘normal’ lives for themselves, and in the attitudes of the cishets towards us.
We’re a world governed by gravity though, both scientifically and ideologically, and as we enjoyed our newfound freedoms up there in the ether, a countermovement was slowly brewing that catapulted us back down to earth, back into a reactionary world that is equating our queerness and, in particular, transness, to once again impinge on our basic human rights.
As someone who had just started being able to articulate my own gender identity, it suddenly became all that more difficult to self-actualise as I began to internalise a lot of the hateful, essentialist rhetoric being espoused by this increasingly popular countermovement.
Then last year, when all that was going on in my head and I had started toying with the idea of creating my own show for the first time, I came across a news story about a city councillor in Sydney who had spearheaded a momentarily-successful campaign to have a number of children’s books containing queer material removed from a local library.
Now, as someone with a German family whose grandparents grew up during the war, witnessing campaigns of book banning doesn’t exactly bode well. And whilst this was something we had been seeing increasingly happen abroad (yes hello America), seeing it flare up in a city not too far away from the one I called home was concerning.
Yes, it was repealed, and yes, there was a huge swell of support for the movement opposing this councillor’s campaign; but that was not a phenomenon I believed we would have to invest time and energy into thwarting, and it left me feeling very disconcerted.
Now all this horrific, reactionary backlash has found the perfect scapegoat in the incredibly innocent drag storytime reading hours we’ve seen pop up all over the place – events that follow in a long, wonderful tradition of storytime hours aimed at fostering a love for libraries and the written word in children.
The backlash to these events perfectly captures everything we’ve touched on above about where society’s latest moral panic is sitting, and what conservative anxieties are centred on: the idea that our words, stories, and the freedom offered by a gender-bending artist reading a book threatens some status quo. And that if that’s all it takes to threaten the system, then it’s not going to take much longer to topple and expose it.
Goody Prostate is quite the character! How did you create and shape this drag-clown persona?
Oh they are indeed – and sometimes I feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew when it comes to Goody (can you do that with your own creation? I think parents can speak on that quite well), which I have especially felt in recent rehearsals where we’ve been re-choreographing some of the show’s numbers.
Something has always drawn me to drag as an artform, particularly given the queer lineage it has. Whilst queer artists have dominated many a medium over the course of history, there are very few artforms we can point to and say that’s ours.
For a while though, the mainstreaming and acute commercialisation of drag became a sort of aversion for me, particularly as part of a larger trend I was sensing around a sort of gentrification of queer ideas and aesthetics. Suddenly people were obsessed with being the ‘fishiest’ queen out there, and I (misogyny in that phrase aside) had no desire to subscribe to this tying together of drag and gender essentialism.
But then I saw local performers and artists beginning to play with different forms of drag that centred on these ideas and aesthetics of gender illusion and androgyny; bearded queens, self-proclaimed ‘freaks’ and ‘drag things’, and I thought ahhh – this is the drag I know, and this is the drag I could do.
Now as I mentioned before, being a bit of a theatre kid, I also happen to be often surrounded by other theatre kids; and a dear theatre-kid-friend of mine one day (after one too many wines if I’m being honest and remembering correctly) gifted me with the beautifully Miller-inspired name Goody Prostate. So when I made the decision to finally metaphorically birth this character into the world, Goody was born, along with the freedom and audaciousness that their boldness offers me.
Drawing on my family’s heritage, Goody represents the queer excesses of Weimar (with a sprinkle of Versailles frivolity), and I developed their aesthetic by combining a mix of avant-garde artists whose bodies of work have long inspired me, such as our home-grown Leigh Bowery, who I actually went to the same high school as (just a few decades after him, obviously!).
Central to Goody’s disposition is the idea that they are a clown; not a queen, or even a king, but the courtly jester who, with their jester’s privilege, sensibility, and vantage point, has the ability to safely mock the powers-that-be – but by making it fun for everyone at the same time.
The show has already received critical acclaim in Adelaide. How has the audience response shaped your performance?
Oh yes! We’ve been very overwhelmed with the response the show has received across both its Melbourne and Adelaide seasons, particularly in the latter, where our solid friends-and-family network were far less present than in my hometown.
What that’s highlighted to me is that a work I thought to be very personal and of my own brain and upbringing is actually incredibly universal, and has resonated with a lot more people from all walks of life than I was originally anticipating.
The audience, we’ve realised, whether knowingly or not, play a massive role in the show, particularly given the fact that it’s a show with a solo character, performing (relatively) uninterrupted for an hour. So a lot of our ongoing conversations in developments and rehearsals have been how do we position the audience within the context of this show, which has been a fun experiment to undertake.
In Adelaide, we trialled a different way of positioning the audience in relation to a new framing narrative we developed for that season, which really changed and amplified the relationship Goody has to the rest of the people in the room. And for Edinburgh, again we’ll be experimenting with another completely new way of framing Goody and the audience, which we’ve been excited about developing in the rehearsal room and are very keen to try out when we arrive!
Now all that said, I can assure you – there’s no forced audience interaction. This ‘positioning’ of the audience I’m talking about is our own dramaturgical workings and doesn’t involve you having to do anything apart from buy a ticket, show up, sit down, and shush for an hour. So you’re not going to be forced to go blow to blow with some chaotic cousin of Ronald McDonald; I promise!
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see KINDER?
If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve read about the number of heavy themes and world events that have inspired the creation of this work – and that may be a bit of a turn off, I totally understand. Often we go to the theatre (and especially Fringe shows) to escape for a little bit, and maybe switch off from having to think about all that which is going on out there.
The heart of this show though is recognising that the stories we’ve told ourselves about being adults maybe aren’t working as well as they were promised to us, and we can imagine other worlds and futures for ourselves.
And I promise you; it’s fun and it’s silly. Goody’s a clown after all, so everything we do in KINDER is for you to laugh at.
