The F word

Listen – only an idiot says it’s fake.

The slams are real. Diving from a turnbuckle to crash and burn, folded in half across a steel guardrail is real. The blood is real. The injuries are real. The passion is real. The emotions are real. The moments of high drama, low comedy and can’t-catch-your-breath spectacle are real. The sacrifices are real. All the important stuff is real.

If you fixate on the little bit that isn’t, then you’re missing the point of wrestling.

I mean, come on now, it was 1938 when American newspapers stopped reporting the results of wrestling matches, when it slowly dawned on them that it might not be, as they used to say back then, “on the square.”

It’s theatre. And it’s one of the most unique and fascinating theatre forms in the world. If it wasn’t so populist and working class, more people would realise that, but just like my beloved street performing, people who should know better are often guilty of judging the quality of an artform by its venue.

All you have to do is look at its roots – carnivals and music halls. It shares more with circus and carnival acts like me than it does with the sporting events that it emulates. A cast of performers – beautiful, muscular, athletic – performing feats of strength, or dazzling acrobatic tricks. Clowns selling the hell out of slapstick schtick. Grumpy ringmasters trying to keep order in the ring. People – real people – performing death-defying stunts in return for a cheer from the crowd. Families who have grown up in this bubble of superhuman spectacle and know nothing else. A travelling show, seemingly populated by people of a slightly different strand of humanity, who live by alternate rules. Wrestling is circus. And circus is theatre.

All good theatre – of whatever type – strives to achieve one simple thing: To make you, while you watch it, forget everything else. To enchant you into the moment. Its moment. To erase your mind of your worries and stresses, to hypnotise you into forgetting that you’re sitting in a seat in a theatre that you travelled to by train. To take out of your mind the idea of past and future, and instead to grab your head in both hands and point your eyes only at what is unfolding in the now.

When wrestling is good it can do this better than anyone else. (And it’s not always good. Not by a long chalk. But then again, I once saw Derek Jacobi in a theatre production of Cyrano De Bergerac which was so bad I had to literally bite the inside of my mouth to stay awake, so... )

The unique thing about wrestling is that, at every point, at every level, it’s real and not real at the same time. There are weeks, months, sometimes years- long storylines about the characters of wrestlers, travelling around the world from show to show – performed by real wrestlers, often with the same names, who really are travelling around the world from show to show. The outcomes of the matches are predetermined, so the storyline can continue to play out, of course. Yes, the people in the ring are working together, rather than against each other. But they’re still doing the things it looks like they’re doing. They’re still high-level athletes, working to exhaustion, and, putting, literally, their necks on the line, to tell a story.

Sure, it’s people in tights, pretending. But have you seen Shakespeare?

When someone tells you how much they enjoyed The Avengers, do you snarkily say “You know Iron Man can’t really fly, right? It’s just special effects”?

Wrestling is fact and fiction dancing together to the music of your suspension of disbelief. When a character climbs the turnbuckle and leaps off, gracefully spinning in the air to land, hard, but somehow safely, on their opponent – you cheer and clap the person for what they did, and the character for why they did it, all at the same time.

When a villainous scumbag does something fittingly despicable – you boo the character because you hate them, but your boo is also secretly a cheer, telling the performer they’re doing a good job in making you hate them.

You’re in on it, and that doesn’t ruin the illusion, because it’s not about the illusion. Like any good magic trick, it’s really about the performance.

At the top levels, the matches aren’t choreographed. They’re improvised. Wordless plays created in the moment by the performers. Like a jazz band listening to each other, giving space for solos, a chorus, and knowing how they’ll take it home. It’s astonishing.

Wrestling, just like theatre, takes the complicated terrain of real life and simplifies it into something that tells resonant stories with familiar archetypes, who sometimes get hit by a steel folding chair.

And who hasn’t wished that real life afforded such clear solutions to its problems?

/MR

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