not for glory - Edinburgh Fringe 2026

Not for glory

★★★★ The artists trust their extraordinary skills enough to dismantle them and the result is alive, gutsy, sensual and a bloody good time.

There is something wonderfully unpretentious about not for glory. Three extraordinary performers, Charlotte Mclean, Jack Anderson and Malin Lewis, bring to the stage skills they have been honing since they were very young: Highland dancing, Irish dancing and bagpiping. Skills acquired initially, it seems, simply because they were fun. And they are very, very good at them.

What makes the show so enjoyable is the sheer pleasure of watching that level of virtuosity collide with a complete willingness to mess with it. These aren't artists approaching Highland dancing, Irish dancing and piping from the outside. These are forms they have grown up with, inhabited and mastered, traditions carrying family, community, history, identity and a whole lot of expectation.

And then they gleefully pull them apart.

not for glory has the courage to deconstruct the traditions that have shaped its performers and throw the pieces at the wall to see what sticks. Contemporary dance, traditional forms, music, memory, humour, technical virtuosity and a healthy dose of chaos all end up in the mix.

It works.

The show is alive. It is accessible. It is genuinely very funny and very good fun. There is no sense of the performers standing above their traditions and explaining them to us; instead, they invite us into the worlds they know, then play with them.

There is also something very moving underneath all the exuberance. These are practices that began in childhood, learned, practised and repeated until the body knows what to do almost before the mind catches up. But alongside the pleasure are questions about competition, expectation, identity and what happens when something you once loved becomes complicated.

Beneath all the formal technique, you can also feel something much more primal in these art forms, the original impulse to move, stamp, make music, gather, celebrate and express yourself through the body. That energy is present in the gutsy, sensual physicality of these three very individual performers. They don't just execute traditions; they inhabit them with enormous physical appetite.

What I loved most is that the performers don't seem afraid to make a mess. They trust their extraordinary skills enough to dismantle them. There is courage in that.

There is generosity too. We get to see the traditions, the histories and the astonishing physical abilities, but we also get to see three artists asking what these things mean to them now.

It is highly skilled, deeply rooted and gloriously unpretentious. And, frankly, a bloody good time.

Review by Kate Gaul