A drag artist. A library. And a catastrophic misunderstanding of a ‘reading hour’. Fresh from its award-winning, critically-acclaimed run at Adelaide Fringe, KINDER comes to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a whip-smart, chaotic and surprisingly tender exploration of childhood, queerness and the rising tide of censorship and reactionary politics in today’s world.
When newly arrived (and wholly intolerable) drag-clown Goody Prostate is mistakenly booked to perform at a children’s story time reading hour, they’ve no choice but to improvise a new act for an unimpressed audience of confused parents and unruly kids. But as Goody scrambles to adapt in real time, a camp, clownish meltdown emerges, spiralling them into a poignant interrogation of memory and misfits.
Finding poetry in panic and comedy in chaos, KINDER blends drag, theatre and storytelling to examine censorship and queer joy. It entangles the silly with the serious and, using drag as both a disguise and a magnifying glass, it asks: what does it mean to grow up? What happens when we start repeating our own histories? And what happens when we forget where our stories come from?
The smash-hit debut from playwright and theatre maker Ryan Stewart also presents a cathartic window into their own upbringing as a neurodivergent, queer bookworm with a head full of imaginary worlds. Stewart comments, “KINDER directly responds to the political climate we have seen erupt globally, where queerness has become front-lined in the new ‘won’t someone think of the children’ moral panic.” An amalgam of fiction and biography, it spirals into the world of language, books, and politics, while also honing in on the simple story of an adult trying to unpack their queer childhood.
