I should probably admit that my knowledge of wrestling is not contemporary. It lives somewhere back in the strange, televised world of the 1970s with characters like Catweazle and Kendo Nagasaki, looming out of World of Sport broadcasts with their beards, masks and half-mythical personas. Modern wrestling, for me at least, remains largely unexplored territory.
As it turns out, this is not a bad place to start. That’s because what Ed Gamester is doing with Mythos: Ragnarök, a touring production which collides Norse mythology with professional wrestling and theatre, has very little to do with nostalgia. Most theatre, Gamester suggests, arrives politely — years of development, funding rounds and a careful path towards opening night. But his show took a different route.
“I refused to do it the proper way,” he says. “Every time I attempted to do it the proper way it was riddled with red tape and timelines. People say you need a couple of years of development and rehearsal. This is insane to me. I’m a wrestler. I don’t know what I’m meant to be doing ten minutes before I go out there.”
So, Gamester eschewed the proper way.
“I just wrote it. I threw it on the stage and we performed it. It wasn’t the best it could be. But it was bloody great. And it was great because it was real.”
Ed Gamester as Loki. Photo by Andrew Max Levy.
Punk theatre
Gamester calls this approach something simple: punk theatre. This spirit runs through Mythos: Ragnarök, named the ‘maddest, baddest show on the [Edinburgh] Fringe’ by the Daily Mail, and about to tour the UK. But Gamester is no stranger to theatre. He spent nearly 20 years working as a professional wrestler and stunt performer, and the way those worlds are valued has clearly stayed with him.
“Stunt performance is such a highly regarded skill,” he says. “Acting in theatre is probably the most highly regarded form of acting. And yet wrestlers who are acting and doing stunts live in theatres with no retakes, no reshoots, are one of the lowest regarded physical performers. People just think we’re pretend sports people.”
For Gamester, the craft was already there given that wrestling has story, character, choreography, and physical risk. “People have a preconception of wrestling that stops them from enjoying it,” he reflects. “People think we’re trying to trick them into believing it’s real, whereas we’re not trying to trick anyone.”
He continues: “Let’s stop pretending this is real. Put it into a storyline context where we all know it’s not real — we’re not actually Norse gods — and see how people react.”
Gamester chose the story of Ragnarök, the Norse myth of the destruction of the world, involving gods, monsters, prophecies and betrayals crashing together in a final collapse. But he says that touring the show across Britain has reminded him of how close those stories sit to local history.
“These myths are a bigger part of our history as English people, as British people really. The Vikings landed in the Wirral. The language north of there in Cumbria is still deeply influenced by Norwegian settlers and Icelandic settlers. Our days of the week are named after the gods that we present in this theatre show.”
Gamester talks about audiences the way musicians talk about crowds.
“If I go out there as a wrestler and I start doing my work and the audience doesn’t care and I just push on with it, then I’m a bad entertainer. You start performing and if the audience isn’t reacting or enjoying it, you change it.”
A different approach
“Wrestling is a working-class art form,” says Gamester. But inside that world, the economics are brutal, as he explains. “When we break into this industry, if you are given 50 quid for two days’ work and maybe a contribution to your fuel, you think you’re onto a winner.”
Ed Gamester as Loki. Image by Max Andrew Levy.
So Gamester made a decision early on: his company would operate differently.
“I pay three times as much on average as the average wrestling show pays,” he says. “I pay more than the West End equity theatre rate. Everyone gets their own accommodation. Everyone gets everything paid for.” And that’s even when things fall apart. “If a show has to cancel, everyone on my card still gets paid. This is what they’re trying to do as a career.”
For Gamester, if wrestling is going to survive as an art form, it has to start valuing the people who make it. “If anyone’s going to make a stand and make sure our working standards are going up, it has to be us.”
I began my conversation with Gamester thinking that wrestling belonged somewhere in a distant television past. But what he describes feels far more unruly: theatre, punk independence, working-class craft and mythology colliding in a live room. This makes the arrival of Mythos: Ragnarök at the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton feel strangely appropriate. Vikings pitching up on the Wirral again. Not by longship, but by wrestling ring.
Main mage by David Wilson Photography, featuring Ed Gamester and Heidi Katrina
Mythos: Ragnarök arrives at the Floral Pavilion, New Brighton on March 31, 2026 before continuing its UK tour. For more information, click here.
