Ed Gamester Talks Mythos: Ragnarok (Interview Part 2)

Here is part 2 of our conversation with creator and star of Mythos: Ragnarok, Ed Gamester. Enjoy!

You touched on it; it’s an uphill battle creating theatre as it is - right? Is it then double when you say I’m going to include wrestling in this, and everyone’s like, “um”?

“That is exactly what people are like. It’s a double-edged sword. On one edge, we’re doing something unique. I can say we’re the only show that’s doing this... ever, and in the world, and that’s great. Huge door opener - right? USP [Unique Selling Point], everyone needs a USP. On the other edge, everyone already knows what wrestling is or thinks they do, and so theatres up and down the country will be like, ‘I’m not interested’ because wrestling is like a low art. It’s like a working-class art. It’s not an art, it’s a sport, but it’s not a sport. So doors that should have opened a long time ago, remain closed to us for no discernible reason, which is why we always come back to Cockpit because they trusted us. So many people are progressive or diverse or experimental, but they’re not. They’re that in name, but they have a very narrow idea of what that means.”

That can almost be a PR thing?

“Of course. They put it on the website, but when it actually comes down to it, no. They don’t put their money where their mouths are. So yeah, it’s an ongoing challenge. Honestly, at this point, with the reviews that we’ve had, the sales that we’ve had, and with the publicity we’ve had – it blows my mind that there are still theatres that won’t accept us. It’s weird that they don’t even entertain it. They’re not like, ‘We haven’t got room in our programming’ or ‘This isn’t the kind of thing we’re doing’. It’s just like, ‘Wrestling really isn’t our thing.’”

And that’s the sticking point, it’s the wrestling?

“It’s the wrestling, yeah. That word. The word wrestling.”

It’s still a dirty word apparently?

“Still a dirty word.”

I read a statistic – this is a few years back – which discusses pro wrestling as a form of theatre, which it is. Phantom’s [Of The Opera] worldwide success was $6 billion over 29 years, whereas WWE earns half a billion a year. So how is the much bigger art form lesser or disrespected?

“Yeah - right? I said this to someone recently when they were calling wrestling this ‘niche thing.’ I said, ‘Niche form? WrestleMania will draw hundreds of thousands of people on one weekend. How many does Les Mis pull in right now?’ Because what is it, 1500, on a night? So it would take Les Mis 2 or 3 months to sell the number of tickets that WrestleMania will sell in a weekend. How are we the niche theatre? How are we the people proving ourselves? It’s nonsense. It’s just because it is out of the mainstream – people have convinced themselves that this isn’t legit or we have got something to prove. We don’t have anything to prove. I’m not proving anything; I’m doing what we do and now people are getting around to coming to see it because I have taken the ropes off, the posts off, and I’ve taken the sporting style away. People keep saying, “Oh, it’s amazing what you guys do,” and I’m like, yeah, it is, but it’s no more amazing than what we’ve been doing all along. It’s just now you’re actually looking at it. And I understand that there is a cheesy element to wrestling.“

There’s a cheesy element to theatre. How do you magically break out into song?

“(Laughs) Yeah, we do that in Mythos. Believe me, the musical Mythos will be coming up as a parody, and I can’t wait. I might do it tonight actually.”

You also do a big thing that wrestling does; you incorporate audience participation, and it does not steer the whole show, but like wrestlers, it helps guide it. Do you think more theatre should do that and incorporate more elements of wrestling?

“I mean, should is a strong word - right? There are parts of the show that you’ll see today where we don’t want the audience interacting because we’re telling a story. We want people to sit and witness it and share in what we’re doing, and there are whole theatre shows out there that are designed for the same reason, to be like, ‘Come and witness this and sit quietly. Otherwise, you’ll disturb it’. And there are other theatre shows, like Shakespeare, for example, which are meant to be rowdy and the audiences are meant to get furious and shout and scream. You’re meant to be confident enough in your character and your acting to be able to step away from your scripted lines to address something that has been thrown onto the stage - metaphorically, or sometimes physically. And I think that shows incredible ability as a performer, and it’s something that wrestlers do very well.

“If someone says something to you, everyone has heard that. And you have a choice; you can either ignore it, which is weird and awkward because it’s real, and it’s there, or you can address it. You don’t have to go off script and go on a meandering detour, but to ignore it, I think, only ever happens because you are worried that you won’t be able to come back again. That’s something I think wrestlers do completely naturally, you can’t teach it. It’s just something that comes with being that nature of a performer – you respond to what the audience wants. At the end of the day, we’re entertainers. So if we go out there and do our show and no one likes it, we could be like, ‘Oh, well, they don’t understand’, but that’s a failure. Our job is to go out there and entertain people. We’re not snobbish. And different audiences require different things to be entertained, so I think it’s absurd to ignore the audience. I think loads of theatre would benefit from understanding how to ride the wave of their audience more, but I understand why they don’t. Our biggest challenge as wrestlers is learning to not follow them [the audience] and not try to pop the audience all of the time because otherwise the show does not ever get started.”

One of the greatest aspects of wrestling is its ability to use wrestling moves and physicality to tell a story. Many high-profile wrestlers always say it’s not about the moves, it’s about the story. Is Mythos the perfect illustration of that for a non-wrestling audience?

“Your words, sir, not mine (laughs). But yeah, I would say so, without a shadow of a doubt because – we’re wrestling, but we’re not wrestling.”

Yeah, I mean, there are no actual wrestling matches.

“There’s no sporting context. There’s no referee, there’s no, like, ‘Let’s have a fight and see who wins’. The wrestling in Mythos is a fight style used to create stage combat. So when two characters decide they’re gonna fight – luckily they’re both wrestlers – so they don’t have to pretend to punch and kick each other and hide gaps and do all the jazzy stuff-”

Or poke people with fake swords (laughs).

“Yeah, little pokes from the swords, and people are napping off one another. You know, West Side Story, everyone is watching in the background and making little punch noises so the other guys look like they are fighting. And this is not disrespectful to that because that is amazing and safe, and you can do that all day long. In ours, we just use the fact that we are wrestlers to be like, ‘We’ll do this full contact’. What I think we have done really well in Mythos is not just dump wrestling onto people and be like, ‘Behold, Moonsault, Canadian Destroyer’, because what we have learned is - people who don’t know wrestling - don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know what a DDT is. They just think both of you have fallen over. If you do a Canadian Destroyer, they’ll think it’s cool, but they have no idea what is happening.”

Who is the one that got hurt?

“Exactly. Who is the one that got hurt is the main problem that we’ve had because, in wrestling, it’s like, ‘Oh, that was interesting; he went from this to that’, and then obviously, when you look at it purely physically, none of this makes sense. Everyone is falling down. So the fact that one guy is slammed and one isn’t is nonsense. Anything off the top rope is obviously ridiculous. Landing on someone is going to hurt you – probably more than them. So, none of it makes sense, and that gets exposed to you as a wrestler when you’re out in front of a theatre crowd. You do something that normally would get a huge pop, and you’re like, ‘What, no one popped for that? It was a stunner’. Then you think, what is a stunner? Oh, I sit down on the floor, the guy falls backwards, and everyone gets confused. So you’re like, ‘Right, let’s scrap that (laughs). Do a chop’.”

Or a Bodyslam because it’s an obvious; I’m throwing this person.

“Boom, exactly. So, to that extent, those are clear storytelling beats. I’ve picked him up, and I’ve slammed him on the floor - right? So we’ve learned a) to strip out the technical wrestling or the bits that wrestling fans think of as being high-level wrestling. But also, there is nothing in Mythos that is not entirely motivated by the story. Almost down to the moves we’ve chosen to do and when. Every single thing is a direct reflection of what the character feels. It was like that from the beginning, but it’s better now because this is our 40th show. By this point, we’ve all done it, and we can have earnest conversations about each other because the acting has come up to a point where I can say, ‘You know what? In that fight, when this happens, it feels weird. I don’t know why I do that because my son is over there, and my daughter is there, and I’m confused. So I don’t feel like I would punch you’. So we can have incredible, minute conversations about the motivations of people throughout it.”

It’s the small details that make it.

“Mythos is all about small details. From the references in the script to the choices of moves – it’s nuanced now to a degree that I never even imagined it to be.”

My final question is - what’s your biggest takeaway from this whole journey of creating and performing in Mythos, and what are the future ambitions? West End?

“My ambition is to take this to the Royal Albert Hall and do a big showcase of it. Yeah, I want to do the West End, for sure. I’ve got my eye on the venue I want to do. We’ll have a London residency first, a small one to prove it works. Yeah, I want to do the West End. I want to take it internationally. I’ve got another three Mythos shows I’m writing in different forms - about different things. My biggest takeaway from the whole thing though is learning to trust my instincts about things and specifically to give these performers a platform to show what they can do. People keep telling me how well I have done, and I keep saying, ‘Thanks, but I just built a platform, and these guys have created it.’ The biggest takeaway is - if you give people a chance to show what they can do, they won’t let you down, and they’ll do it. And they will feel respected.

“The thing I’m proudest of in this whole show is backstage. It’s not the standing ovations we’ve had. We get them quite a lot, which is incredible to me. It’s not how well-respected wrestling is becoming, it’s not how people are starting to get back into wrestling; it’s when you go backstage, and everyone is happy. Everyone feels respected. Everyone feels loved. No one feels under pressure. Most of us quit wrestling because of anxiety reasons. We just couldn’t stand the constant criticism, no matter how well you do, constantly worrying about who you’ve let down or the million reasons why wrestling can be a really toxic place to work. Whereas here, people who have quit for that reason feel at home and loved, and they will not wrestle anywhere else. I think there are four people on the show tonight who will not wrestle anywhere else other than Mythos because it’s not wrestling, but they get to do what they love, and that’s my biggest takeaway, just let people do what they love.”

To stay up-to-date with Mythos: Ragnarok, click here.