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Wrestling with the gods – Mythos: Ragnarök body-slams the Fringe

Lisa Simonis Lisa Simonis
14 Aug 2025

Whenever my friends ask me for show recommendations, Mythos: Ragnarök is top of my list.

I figured that pro wrestlers are modern mythological characters

It’s fun to tell them about this show based on Norse mythology, featuring the likes of Odin and Loki, and watch their jaws slowly drop when I mention it’s all told through wrestling.

Mythos: Ragnarök is the only show of its kind in the world and one of the Fringe’s successes. Having debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2021, the show opened to a single audience member, who has since attended every year’s opening night. Four years on, it’s one of the highest-rated shows, selling out performances and becoming a crowd favourite at the Fringe, with a dedicated cult following.

Curious to discover how this crowd-pleaser came into existence, I sat down with Ed Gamester, the creator, owner, pro-wrestler and lead performer of Mythos: Ragnarök.

Having known him only as Odin in the show, I couldn’t help but feel nervous about meeting this intimidating pro-wrestling god. Ed, as I soon discovered, is a kind and caring gentleman with a deep passion for storytelling and wrestling.

“I’ve been a wrestler forever, since I was 16. So I was very familiar with the wrestling industry and how wrestling worked as an art form, as a form of storytelling. I thought it was the best thing that I ever discovered or ever did.”

With an extensive career as a stunt performer, fight arranger and athlete, Ed combined the artistic flair, charisma, storytelling and improvisational skills of a pro wrestler with freestyle Olympic-style wrestling and stunt elements.

“I tried to combine the three of them together to take the best of all those things to create a new way of doing violence – live violence that hadn’t been done before. I decided to base that in Norse mythology because that’s just my own background and my interest.”

While studying philosophy at university, Ed got to “really dig into the old myths and legends in their original languages and play with the poetry of it all. So, when the opportunity came up to create my own show, I thought, ‘Hey, I want to base it on that because I love it.’”

Mythos: Ragnarök strikes a chord with audiences that is hard to pinpoint, possibly due to the combination of factors. Ed has undoubtedly found a stylistic crossover between mythology and wrestling that makes total sense as a medium.

“If you describe mythology, it’s a collection of superhuman entities often colliding over ridiculous nonsense and resolving their conflicts through fights or trickery. They become household names, and people know they don’t exist, but they still act like they do. It’s like a quasi-realistic approach to a religion. Thor doesn’t exist, but you still tell stories about him as if he does, and people do that with wrestling; they’re massive characters that archetype characters that collide over nonsense and fight one another, and we all know The Rock isn’t actually The Rock, but you’re still talking about him like he’s The Rock. In my world, I figured that pro wrestlers are modern mythological characters, and pro wrestling is modern mythology.”

Although the ideas had been brewing for some time, the pandemic’s closure of film sets and wrestling shows, and prohibition of performances by government decree, meant that Ed and the cast were out of work. “So I was forced to sit and write the show. And then I was forced to put it on its feet, because I was going to go insane if I didn’t get to perform. Because it’s not just a job, it’s a lifestyle.”

After a brief run at a theatre in London in 2021, the show made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “No one has ever done wrestling here, not like that. There’d been occasional one-off wrestling shows and normal wrestling, but no one had ever done a run. No one had done wrestling every single night at the Fringe. So there was no blueprint for it. But I knew it needed to happen because until wrestling and wrestlers are in environments like this, people will never understand what we do.”

Ed, along with his partner Melanie Watson, who designed the show’s look and costumes, has worked for five years to get the show off the ground, continuously improving it. All set pieces are built and handmade by them, inspired by Viking-age artwork – no small task, as the costumes must look worthy of the gods while also surviving being wrestled in.

“Every night we get slammed into the floor, into hard surfaces. There are people in the cast who are close to seven feet tall, and some are 130 kilograms.”

Having recently celebrated his 200th performance, Ed’s efforts have paid off as “the venues have got bigger and badder every single year”. The show has now travelled to six countries and is booked till 2027, but always returns to its debut stage at the Edinburgh Fringe, where fans and newcomers alike have rallied around Mythos: Ragnarök, with many audience members having come to see it in the past and wearing the show’s merch.

The show is layered, showcasing what is possible through the storytelling art of wrestling.

“The storytelling art of wrestling is so versatile, it isn’t just limited to ‘You’ve annoyed me, now we’ll fight’, which is what we do for the first bit of the show. Once we’ve done that and proved how well it works, the next step is to show how we handle tragedy and emotional beats. Can we do emotional stuff?”

In a festival overflowing with theatre, comedy and musicals, Ed makes a point about wrestling:

“In a musical, when the character gets to a point where they can’t talk anymore about their feelings, they sing. In our show, when we can’t talk about our feelings anymore, we fight. And if you think musicals are legitimate theatre, then you should think we’re a legitimate theatre. It’s a different way of expressing feelings and telling stories.”

You can catch Ed taking on the role of Loki in this year’s Mythos: Ragnarök.

Lisa Simonis

Lisa Simonis

Lisa Simonis is a writer, dancer and art historian based in Edinburgh.

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