Brighton Fringe 2026
Kinder
Goody Prostate
Genre: Biographical Drama, Character Stand up, Comedy, Contemporary, Costume, Fringe Theatre, International, LGBTQ+ Theatre, New Writing, Political, Queer Theatre, Short Plays, Solo Show, Theatre, World Theatre
Venue: The Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
With Kinder, the German word has so many ramifications. Is it what we need to be ourselves? More childlike and accepting, or just a bit nicer? Directed by Tish Bullock, Goody Prostate’s award-winning Kinder from Australia kicks off at the Lantern till May 7 and then tours everywhere, even to Prague.
Do see this aching, poignant and very funny rite of passages when it lands.
Review
So you’re a drag artist and glammed for that slithering hour, only to be told whilst you’ve got an hour to rehearse, you’ve got a job at a children’s library. And nothing in your current routine prepares you for the fact they’d not be prepared at all for you. So what’s new? Agonising over that brings Goody Prostate back to their German childhood, confronting what it is we do to kids. With Kinder, the German word has so many ramifications. Is it what we need to be ourselves? More childlike and accepting, or just a bit nicer? Directed by Tish Bullock, Goody Prostate’s award-winning Kinder from Australia kicks off at the Lantern till May 7 and then tours everywhere, even to Prague.
Goody Prostate, Ryan Stewart’s, creation is coupled with the very different yet related NIUSUA, with more pronounced Holocaust themes; and the same Australian team bring both to the UK.
This is a very slick show indeed, and that’s no snide disparagement. It’s a joy to see lights and sounds snap on and off (occasionally and deliberately not doing so) in Tom Vulcan’s lighting design, with the sound composition by Jack Burmeister (both here helmed by the Lantern team).
One point of Kinder (German for children too) is that double helix of nature and nurture colliding, and how we start to twist it. Goody Prostate relates their early life, with good German parents who divorce, never really understanding their child, and bidding them eat their food, since they starved as children in the war. Kinder chronologically seems set in the 1990s but that’s a detail, since this is a perennial story.
Throughout some familiar disco classics pipe and lights flash as Goody struts their stuff and sense of world and its celebrations. But how prepare for the library? At least there’s a young-looking audience Goody muses, purring. Or it could just be the lighting.
Another strand lies in the title a Goody relates they were a linguistics student, promising indeed. So promising they would leave linguistics. But it’s hard-wired and at one moment we get a kind of mirror as blackboard or silver-board lesson as etymologies of kind are discussed. Lipstick on a mirror is a pretty good start I education from this premiss; a mirror’s crowded with incident and photos, as the floor is with boxes and clothing littered as Goody rifles through them and finds some German fruit compound in a plastic bowl. It looks like it might be a substitute for lippy.
Goody divest themselves of all their jewel-encrusted belts and strips to a leather uniform, rather sinisterly shadowing the rise of the people who destroyed the Hirschfeld Institute and burned its books: the first such burning in Germany, and by students. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin, or Institute was the world repository of sexuality. By the 1930s Dr Magnus Hirschfeld had discovered 43 million sexualities and combos from the human body. And that was with just two billion people on the planet. Not that Hirschfeld was immune to prejudice. One of his three Es was. – and yes I guessed it – Eugenics.
If that makes it seem like a lecture, or even partial, that’s nothing can prepare you for this one as Goody slithers their history round what makes us kin, or kinder. The analogies fascinate, the story sashays through to a white-themed apotheosis of kiddies clown apparel, But getting there Goody divagates on identity, including that which triggers – this whole library booking is a huge trigger – and what to do when you’re fired into the world. Children are accepting of everything, yet those permeable walls start hardening. Despite all the joke of openings, and sex is jokey rather than stroked in here, this is a paly of acceptance and new flexible boundaries of a world that hardens too fast. And that’s not a pun, though there’s plenty of those in the show.
Tom Vulcan’s lighting allows some spectacular and exquisite effects (particularly one starry moment) that make this show seem far larger than it is, and with much theatre-business rifling around from Goody. The theme emerges strongly in the last 30 minutes, though there’s much scrabbling about and it’d be even better if those moments that take up the shows centre were more perfectly aligned with the narrative. The whole point is of course a rummage in the past to an audience: as a rehearsal room provide sanctuary and anxiety in the same mix. There’s quite a few visual jokes for good effect and just occasionally I felt a slight wandering. That’s only to judge this show by the highest standards it demands: since it’s potentially outstanding. That and knowing how to spring a last apotheosis, or sucker-punch currently donned with the final outfit. But do see this aching, poignant and very funny rite of passages when it lands.
