Phil Wang was about to get his hands on the championship belt. He was claiming the prize for Clash of the Comics, the bombastic night that throws comedians and pro wrestlers into the ring, when Ed Gamble stormed in, knocked everyone out, and swanned off with the belt. “Well,” corrects the comedian and Clash co-founder Max Olesker, “we were knocked down by his henchman.” Hulking pro wrestler Bullit was the one to clothesline him and his comedy partner, Ivan Gonzalez. “I think I could have taken Ed if he’d been on his own,” huffs Olesker.
The popularity of pro wrestling has fluctuated since its golden era in the 1980s. At the start of this year, WWE made the leap on to Netflix with an eye-watering $5bn (£4bn) deal, inching the skimpily clad, heavily muscled combat sport higher in the public consciousness. In Britain, it has a rich working-class history, growing from the grassroots to raising some of the greatest international contenders such as Will Ospreay and Zack Sabre Jr. Now, wrestling is dipping a greased-up toe into the theatrical limelight, with a smattering of productions across the UK welcoming new audiences through alternative performance lenses, from comedy to queer cabaret to a living sculpture that uses bondage to suspend disbelief.
Olesker, who used to be the UK’s youngest pro wrestler as Max Voltage, was the one to introduce Gonzalez to wrestling, putting on a match in the student union at university. “The atmosphere was electric,” Gonzalez remembers. “It’s this larger-than-life pantomime: good versus evil.” Forming a comedy duo together as Max & Ivan, the pair decided to blend the art forms for a show at the Edinburgh fringe, convincing pro wrestlers that they weren’t making fun of them and persuading comedians to throw themselves off the ropes. The Wrestling, as it was then called, won the Edinburgh comedy award and has rocketed in popularity since.
Renamed Clash of the Comics, the brutal showdown that saw Rosie Jones defeat Greg Davies at the O2, as part of the 2023 Just for Laughs festival, is about to take over the Hammersmith Apollo, west London, where for the first time it will stand outside a wider comedy festival. The lineup includes pro wrestlers Simon Miller, Cara Noir and La Cyclonica, with comedians Aisling Bea, Flo & Joan and James Acaster, who has issued an open challenge to any comedian or wrestler willing to take him on. And, naturally, Wang needs to win his championship belt back from Gamble. Commentating from the sidelines, Nish Kumar will be cheering for the rule-breaking baddies, Sara Pascoe will support the good and righteous, and Greg James will give an impartial play-by-play. Comedy is key to the night, but the show’s success relies on the spectacles in the ring. “They’re both performance art,” Olesker considers. “You travel the world, you react to an audience. It’s a real meeting of disciplines.”
Logistically, the event is a nightmare. The comedians are sent to wrestling school to make their transformations possible. “I guess in the same way that Strictly Come Dancing teaches the celebrities not to become professional dancers, but to dance a very specific dance,” Gonzalez says, “we teach our comedians to wrestle for one specific moment.” The comics often come with ambitions of spectacular moves, which the team do their best to realise. “And much like Strictly,” Olesker adds, “all our wrestlers and comedians are having affairs with one another.” He keeps a straight face. “It just makes the whole thing fly.”
Wrestling walks a constant tightrope between reality and pretence. “You’re training your body to be an athlete,” says Heather Bandenberg, who runs Fist Club, an LGBTQ+ cabaret night pitched as “Wrestling but gayer”. Melding queer performance and pro wrestling, the night features back-flipping drag kings, anarchic performances from pro wrestlers and an openness to the types of bodies that tend to be excluded from the mainstream. “You’re training to be a gymnast and you’re doing elements of stunt,” Bandenberg says. “It hurts.” One of the early moves a wrestler learns is how to “bump”, the classic move where they throw themselves on to the floor in order to imitate the impact of being thrown by someone else. The impact is real, even if the weight distribution and choreography lessen the pain. “There is an element of danger,” says Bandenberg. The liveness exaggerates this, as shows teeter between planned and improvised. “It’s one of the few performance art forms where the reaction of the crowd informs what will happen,” says Olesker. “People won’t do an extra scene in a Shakespeare play if people are really into it.”
Bandenberg stumbled upon wrestling by accident, quickly falling for the space it allowed her to take up. “WWE has never been a great place to be a woman,” she says. “I saw the main world of wrestling and was like: This isn’t for me. But I found I wasn’t the only person who felt like this.” She formed the event with pro wrestling drag kings Rich Tea and Rocky Rhodes. For them, the collaboration between wrestling and cabaret seemed obvious. “Wrestling is drag,” Bandenberg says. “You have an alter ego. You’re getting the audience on your side.”
Run for queer and female wrestlers, Fist Club leaps between venues across the UK and sells out fast, with some audience members having been persuaded to start wrestling themselves. Primarily featuring smack-talking drag kings, the night has a quota of 10% of straight male wrestlers: “Because that’s what it’s like to be a woman or queer person on a normal wrestling show.” The audience of their last show included a vicar in her 60s, who apparently had a glorious time. “We want it to be open to people who have never seen wrestling before,” Bandenberg says.
A successful match relies on the sell: the performance. “You’re trying to make the audience believe you’re actually getting, you know, completely totalled in the face,” Bandenberg explains while miming knocking herself out. All the hosts are careful to make everything as safe as possible for their shows, but injuries aren’t uncommon. Olesker broke his ankle in the first show. In training, Bandenburg jumped off the top rope and broke both her big toes. “But I’ve got off lightly,” she shrugs.
In Glasgow, the speed of a typical wrestling match is being frozen in time for a new piece of performance art. Luke George and Daniel Kok are the artists behind Still Lives, an installation using shibari, a rope-knotting bondage technique typically used in kink practice, to construct still images in the air. Adapting the piece to every city it moves to, they wrap people up, heave them high and suspend them, creating these breathing images with Australian rules players in Melbourne and rugby union players in Auckland. They are particularly interested in using underrepresented bodies. It’s not always sport; in Venice they wrapped up a gondolier. “We’re looking for something that can give us a sense of what life is like in that city,” says Kok.
In Glasgow, they have chosen wrestling, using the bodies of pro wrestlers Molly Spartan and Jake Lawless to create the living sculpture. Audiences will watch as the pair are carefully tied and hauled up, then slowly brought back down and undone. Coming from dance and performance backgrounds, the artists are invested in endurance and what the body is capable of. “We’re working with degrees of discomfort and endurance,” George says of the physical demands on the participants, “but it’s not sitting in pain for an hour.”
Bondage drags with it certain assumptions about violence and dominance, yet both shibari and wrestling delicately navigate care, consent and power. “It’s about trust and communication, about listening to each other and watching for cues,” George says. They’ve been surprised by the similarities between the art forms, with each relying on watchful adjustments throughout. “Wrestlers have ways to communicate when there’s a certain narrative arc they’re trying to achieve,” Kok says, “so they’re looking out for each other even while they’re fighting.”
Wider popularity for wrestling may come in waves, but for the truly dedicated, commitment is unrelenting. Months are spent organising getting the Clash of the Comics comedians to wrestling school. The Fist Club fighters train multiple times a week, with Still Lives capturing this devotion by stretching out the patient endurance of preparation. Through their chosen styles, these artists want to celebrate the sport, welcome new supporters and show that wrestling doesn’t belong to a single gender, shape or style.
“There’s so much happening live,” says Bandenberg, “done by people who love it. They’re not getting rich off it, they’re just seeing it as a creative art form that brings joy.”
Clash of the Comics is at Hammersmith Apollo, London, 8 October; Fist Club is at Colour Factory, London, 11 October, and Lost Horizon, Bristol, 8 November; Still Lives is at Tramway, Glasgow, 25 October.
