The Floral Pavilion sits out on the edge of New Brighton, facing the Mersey with Liverpool’s docks looming across the water. Around it, the place holds that familiar seaside mix: arcades, food stalls, families drifting, a slight wear that never tips into decline because there is too much life moving through it. It feels right that this show lands here. It would lose something in a cleaner space.
Mythos Ragnarök arrives with talk of madness. It is that, but not in any loose sense. What unfolds is tightly controlled, deliberate, and alive in a way most theatre rarely reaches. The opening comes through sound. A deep, resonant pulse fills the room, closer to ritual than music. It sits in the body. By the time the performers emerge, the audience is already inside it, and what follows is unexpectedly funny. Not a passing moment, but properly funny. Sharp, well-timed, confident.
Ed Gamester’s Loki leads with a narrator’s grip and a trickster’s instinct, undercutting the grandeur of gods at just the right moments. Thor, strong of body and weak of mind, delivers a version of Hamlet’s Yorick speech with a severed head pulled from a bag. It should fall apart. It does not. What becomes clear quickly is that this is not wrestling as sport. It is wrestling as theatre. Roland Barthes wrote about wrestling as spectacle rather than competition, where good and evil are made visible, exaggerated, legible. I remember encountering that and feeling something shift. Those Saturday afternoons by the gas fire, wrestling flickering on television, suddenly sat alongside opera and theatre. Not lesser, but part of the same language.
That sits at the centre of Mythos Ragnarök, but Gamester and his troupe push it further, louder, more visceral. Every clash carries narrative weight, landing in the body as much as the mind. This is punk theatre in the truest sense. Intense and illuminating, witty and dark, violent and unexpectedly gentle, and at times genuinely beautiful.
Ed Gamester as Loki by Andrew Max Levy
The physicality is immense. Bodies collide with force that echoes through the room, the canvas booming, the impact felt as much as heard. These are controlled collisions delivered at speed, but within them are moments of stillness, figures caught in light and smoke, composed with a painter’s eye. It is choreography built through force rather than finesse.
There is something important in how the room responds, and it is not accidental. When I spoke to Gamester ahead of the show, he described it as punk theatre not as style, but condition. It only works if the room gives itself to it. English audiences, he said, begin held back, then let go. You can feel that happening. The laughter cracks open, the claps begin to carry, and then the separation goes. Audience and performers become one thing, a single breathing body, a beast in motion. The slam of a body onto canvas travels through the room, the laugh spreads, the performers push and the audience pushes back.
This is where the punk sits, not in costume or soundtrack, but in the refusal of distance. There is no safe vantage point. Performers move through the aisles, across the carpet, into the rows. Loki flees through the crowd, pauses to deliver a mock glowing review from an empty seat, then is dragged back into the action. For a moment, two children heading for the toilets are caught in the path of it all, part of the same unfolding world.
It feels more alive than most of what sits outside the theatre doors, not the solitary trudge through rain and private thought, but something collective, vital. Myth not as story, but as event, enacted rather than told. The mythology itself is less about faithful retelling than dismantling. These gods are vain, petty, brutal, ridiculous. Power is shown as performance, something asserted and contested, lifted and thrown both physically and symbolically. Nothing resolves cleanly. There is no easy victory, no neat moral order restored. The struggle itself is the point.
There are echoes here of older forms, of music hall, working men’s clubs, variety, performance that demands response or fails entirely. This is closer to the raw edge of Frank Randle rather than the cheery bonhomie of George Formby. That lineage runs through it, even as it feels entirely of its moment. This is theatre that meets the demands for meaning that does not hide behind stale expectation.
Image by David Wilson Photography, featuring Ed Gamester and Heidi Katrina
After the show, in the art deco foyer, the cast return to meet the audience. Up close, the scale is striking, but so is their generosity. One shakes hands with his left, the right clearly damaged from the night’s work. The choreography may be planned, but the impact is not an illusion. All of this happens without external funding. Adventures of this kind require bravery beyond the physical, and this troupe leave us all inspired and impressed by them as people, as well as gods.
On a night when you could have chosen something easier, something familiar, Mythos Ragnarök offers something else entirely. It is wild, clever, funny, physical, and fully alive. It is also one of the most exciting pieces of theatre you are likely to see.
Main image by Max Andrew Levy
To read Peter Shukie’s interview with Ed Gamester, click here.
