Kinder is a one person show, telling the story of Drag Queen Goody Prostrate, as she hastily tries to reconfigure her costume, and her act, following her realisation that there’s been a significant misunderstanding about a booking she’s about to leave for.
Goody has recently arrived in this unspecified part of Germany. She’s got her rhinestone bejewelled lederhosen on, her stompy heeled boots, a killer wig, and she’s ready to go and entertain the gay masses.
Cue an unexpected phone call, and suddenly the scramble is on to adjust, well, everything. Because Goody has in fact been booked for a Drag Time Story Hour. Protestors are expected.
If you’ve somehow missed the “debate” that’s being deconstructed here, there’s currently a discourse surrounding the mere existence of ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’, an event often held in local libraries, in which, as the name suggests, Drag Queens read books to children.
The predictable hysteria has developed about this entirely voluntary activity, which features age-appropriate books, which absolutely no-one is forced to take their child to, if they don’t want to. Also, pantomime, with its Dames, exists.
One of the nuances of this show is in the title, is it ‘Kinder’? To be pronounced with a German accent, and therefore meaning ‘children’? Or is it ‘kinder’, of the meaning ‘be nicer to each other’. Arguably here, it’s both. If the baying mobs were somehow a little kinder, then maybe their children would be fine, actually.
This is a difficult discussion to engage with, so entrenched have opinions become on both sides.
On a minimalist set, Stewart as Goody works through a series of costumes, whilst recalling moments from Goody’s life. There’s a mirror at the back of the performance space, decorated with pictures, photographs, with numerous small momentos. At times, Goody addresses us via the mirror: her back is to us, but we can still see everything that’s silently written on her face.
The show is really very funny at times, as it challenges ideas of hetero-normativity. There’s an extended sequence talking about the Institute for Sexual Science, headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute, and its extensive collection of papers and records relating to LGBT people, were destroyed by the Nazis, in one of their book-burning events.
Goody draws parallels with the current situation of book bans in the US, that are spreading to Europe, and how this loss of knowledge and understanding cannot be allowed to happen again.
Writer and performer Ryan Stewart, has brought this show to Edinburgh after a run at the Adelaide Fringe, and his confidence in his material shines through. It feels like a conversation with a friend. An admittedly one-sided conversation, where you don’t get to say much, and your friend goes off on a tangent, a lot, but a friendly chat all the same.
There’s humour running through the upset and sense of anxiety, about being attacked just for who you are, and what you look like, and what you do for a job.
Kinder takes an important conversation, and relates it to the people it effects directly; the people who are all too often left out of the conversation, or ignored. Goody speaks as a drag queen, and we should all be listening.
Kinder continues in Big Belly at Underbelly Cowgate, at 18:40 daily, until August 24 (not 6, 13, 20)
Featured Image by Alex Winner, courtesy of Chloe Nelkin Consulting
