“Once Upon a Storytime”: Ryan Stewart on their nostalgic reflection of history, childhood, and the reading hour that wasn’t

This year, my Opa will turn 91. One of my last surviving grandparents, he was born in Nuremberg in 1934, so with over 60 years and 16,000km difference between the time and place that we were born, it can be hard to conceive any similarities between the upbringings we had, and the adolescence and adulthood we grew into. As the old adage goes though, history has a devious habit of repeating itself, so lately the difficulty of those imagined parallels has waned, laying bare the stark reality of a world today that seems hell-bent on imitating its own mistakes.

A year before my Opa was born, on an early Spring morning in Berlin, a group of students, with brass band in tow, stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, the Institut was the first recorded sexology research institute in the world, and a symbol of the enlightened Weimar culture that had flourished across the decade prior, with its particular focus on the study of (and education around) queerness. And after breaking through its doors and ransacking its halls, those students gathered up the tens of thousands of books, research papers, and data held in the Institut, hauled it onto the streets, and burned it all – placing a small bust statue of Hirschfeld on top of the burning pile.

Last year, a councillor in a city not too far from me decided to put forward a motion to ban a number of books from the local library, succeeding for a short time in his endeavours. The works in question included a picture book on ‘Same-Sex Parents’ recommended for 5 to 7-year-olds, with the ban echoing the wider crusade centred on the banning of queer texts directed at younger people, a movement which is currently contributing to record levels of censorship in the US. But more than just our libraries, it is also our schools, universities, and pursuance of education that are under attack. Both ideologically, through the crackdown on protests, syllabi, and admissions that we’re seeing play out across academic institutions, and physically, through the destruction and ruin they have been subjected to in the war-torn pockets of the world that have become the playground battlefields of despotic leaders.  

This is the world that I’m grappling with in KINDER. A world where our language, books, art, and ourselves; our very bodies, are still being debated over, contested, and once again reviled. And if you throw drag into the fold of this bombardment, you can suddenly see how story-time reading hours; innocent, communal celebrations of literature and culture, have become the new scapegoat for a contingent of grown ups who are afraid to confront stories that question the delicate fabric of society they’ve wrapped themselves in. But drag artists and queer bodies continue to wrap themselves in something more colourful, more durable, and most importantly, more liberatory. And it is this vision of the world that KINDER’s sole character – my drag-clown Goody, lurks within; a symbol of the bygone excesses of Weimar, butting up against the stoic sensibilities of today’s politics.

No matter the generation through which we were raised, a reality of navigating the world as a queer person is the recognition that we do so with an in-built tension within us. We suppress, conceal, and code-switch parts of ourselves constantly as we pursue the path of least resistance to safety. But what happens when that tension becomes too much to hold? You get overflow. And this is what we come to be known for; camp excess, superficiality, overabundance, and perhaps most notoriously; protest. The packaging is damaged, the status quo threatened, and suddenly a figure like Goody emerges, ready for a fight and a reckoning.

At the heart of KINDER though is a story about the hope for change. If history and its stories are cyclical, then the tale of hope is an ancient one, and for queer people today it is one of the few we can still cling to without futility. A number of years ago, I first begun the process of coming out to my family and entered into that space of negotiation with oneself where you assess how safe disclosure will be with certain people in your life. My Opa was one of those people I considered for a long time, especially given the generation he was born into, and the influence of a childhood marked by a membership within the infamous Youth division of the regime he was born under. Yet despite this upbringing, and the stories he may have been told about people like me as an impressionable young child, when he found out about me, he was so ready to integrate an acceptance of queerness within his weltanschauung, and continue loving me the way he always had.

Every now and then we interact with those around us who tear slightly at that delicate, societal fabric that so many are working tirelessly to conserve, and we catch a glimpse of what a brighter, queerer future could look like. So – pull up a pew! We’ve got a seat for you, and some stories to share. KINDER is an invitation to rip just that little bit harder, and Goody’s ready to hand you the scissors, whenever you’re ready to take them.

KINDER runs from Thursday 31 July – Sunday 24 August 2025 (not 6, 13, 20), 6:40pm, at Underbelly Cowgate (Big Belly), 66 Cowgate, Edinburgh EH1 1JX, United Kingdom.

More about KINDER

KINDER is the debut play by Ryan Stewart and offers a cathartic glimpse into their upbringing as a neurodivergent, queer bookworm with a head full of imaginary worlds.

A drag artist, a library, and a catastrophic misunderstanding of a ‘reading hour’ come together in KINDER. Fresh from its award-winning run at the Adelaide Fringe, this production arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with a sharp, chaotic, and surprisingly tender exploration of childhood, queerness, and the increasing wave of censorship and reactionary politics in today’s world.

Goody Prostate, a newly arrived (and wholly intolerable) drag clown, is mistakenly scheduled to perform at a children’s storytime reading hour. With no choice but to improvise a new act for an unimpressed audience of confused parents and unruly kids, Goody scrambles to adapt in real time. As Goody navigates the chaos, a campy and clownish meltdown unfolds, leading to a poignant exploration of memory and misfits.

KINDER finds poetry in panic and comedy in chaos, blending drag, theatre, and storytelling to explore themes of censorship and queer joy. It intertwines the silly with the serious, using drag as a disguise and a magnifying glass. The performance asks important questions: What does it mean to grow up? What occurs when we begin to repeat our own histories? And what happens when we forget the origins of our stories?