Two-time Screen Actors Guild Award-winning actress Julie Lake (Orange is the New Black) and award-winning vocalist and songwriter Annie Macleod are bringing their bold, personal and unfiltered new musical play Forget-Me-Not to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August.
Inspired by events lived first-hand by Julie and Annie, Forget-Me-Not explores the painful and often invisible choice many women face between caregiving/parenting and self-expression, told through the lens of one enduring, complex friendship. In this exclusive interview with FAB UK, the duo reflect on writing through exhaustion, why the show is a reclamation, and how vulnerability can be both terrifying and freeing at the same time.
Forget-Me-Not draws directly from your own friendship. Was it daunting to put such a personal story on stage for strangers to witness?
Oh yeah—absolutely. We’ve cried so much writing this play. It’s gutted us, brought us to our knees more than once. There’ve been times I’ve genuinely wondered if we’re a little insane for doing this. But then we did it for the first time in front of friends, and they cried too. There was this shared release, this catharsis, and I realized—this is why we’re doing it. Still, the vulnerability hangover is real. Constant.
How much of the play is verbatim from your lives, and how much is heightened or fictionalised for the theatre?
It’s all true—every single part of the story actually happened. Nothing’s fictionalized. The only thing we’ve slightly shifted is the timeline, just to make it work within a 55 minute show—which was its own beast. But everything we say happened, happened. If anything, real life was way more dramatic. We had to tone things down just to keep it moving.
Female friendship is often underexplored in theatre – why was it important to you to centre it here?
Because that’s really what the whole play is about—the transformational power of female friendship. We were both at these low points, full of shame and fear, and it was reconnecting that helped us find our way back to ourselves. Back to creativity, to integrity, to wholeness. We’ve been friends for 30 years, so even when we lost ourselves, we still remembered each other. That bond pulled us through. It saved us, honestly.
The play touches on motherhood, creativity and the “unlived life.” How did you each bring your own experiences of those themes into the writing?
We wrote this play in the thick of it—with little kids underfoot. Julie’s kids are 2 and 5, Annie’s are 7 and 11. This show is about how we survived those early years and somehow pulled ourselves through as artists. We don’t have nannies or full-time help—we’re just regular moms, staying up with puking kids, then getting up the next morning to keep writing, rehearsing, and now taking this show to Edinburgh… on our own. Which, yeah, feels totally insane.
But this play became a reclamation. Of our artist lives. Our voices. Our desire—so much of which got buried in those early years of caregiving. Choosing to do the show wasn’t easy. Julie really wrestled with leaving her 2-year-old and kept asking: Will she be okay if I go? And eventually the harder question came up—Will I be okay if I don’t? And the answer was no.
The silence that follows a falling-out between friends can feel just as devastating as a romantic break-up. How do you hope audiences relate to that emotional truth?
I think audiences will really feel it. It’s not just one friendship falling apart—it’s this one-two punch of loss after loss. We’re both stripped bare. And that silence between us… it was brutal. I think a lot of people know that feeling, even if they don’t talk about it. Maybe some folks in the audience will walk away thinking about the relationships they’ve lost, and whether any of them might be worth reclaiming.
Do you see Forget-Me-Not as a hopeful story? And what do you want people to feel as they leave the theatre?
Absolutely—it’s a hopeful story. Not in a “we made it to Edinburgh, everything’s perfect now” kind of way. It’s hopeful because it shows how friendship and creativity saved us. How doing this brave, terrifying thing—singing our songs, telling the truth—helped pull us out of the shame and back into wholeness and integrity. We both went through fire, and we’ve come out changed. I hope women, especially mothers, leave feeling inspired to take even one small step toward their own freedom and self-expression.
Annie Macleod and Julie Lake will be performing their show ‘Forget-Me-Not’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August.
For tickets and more information, visit: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/forget-me-not