EDINBURGH 2025: Review: FORGET-ME-NOT, Fern Studio at Greenside @ George Street

An all-true, two-hander beauty of gig theatre Forget-Me-Not celebrates the multitudes of womanhood, the beauty in reclaiming your voice and the lifeline that is the power of female friendship. 

Through absolutely gorgeous music and vibrant and funny yet vulnerable storytelling, two women, two chairs, a piano and an acoustic guitar paint the picture of these best friends' shared history and of the longing and identity-seeking that hitches onto the experience of new parenthood in one way or another. 

The music takes the dialogue to transcendent emotional depth through stirring original songs by both performers. With a voice powerful and rich in timbre, Julie Lake makes up one half of The Wildflowers behind Forget-Me-Not. 

Alongside her beautiful songwriting and deft piano accompaniment, you almost wonder how she didn’t garner fame first as a musician before finding it on Orange Is The New Black as inmate Angie Rice, a role for which she won two Screen Actors Guild awards.

Her pure resonance is supported beautifully by award-winning songbird musician and performer Annie Macleod, the two producing soaring harmonies, the kind that make your head feel a bit echoey and send tingles down your arms. On the guitar and as the other half of the duo, Annie’s lilting vocals and lyrical songwriting are haunting and tender, evoking the stylings of Alison Krauss and Sam Phillips. The pair seamlessly weave in and out of song and story, taking the audience on their journey from childhood friends to long-distance friends now navigating together the highs and lows of their own individual, and at times conflicting, experiences of motherhood.

The 55-minute morning show directed by Peter Cook (Never Sleep Alone) allows the audience to glimpse a real friendship that bears witness to the souls of the women within it, artists and mothers Lake and Macleod whose bond endures and is shaped by change, growth, resentment, rupture, repair, joy, guilt, fertility, cross-continental visits… and a few distracted Zoom calls and jam sessions. 

For anyone who has a time-tested relationship that crosses many miles, for anyone who understands the messy choices women too often face between caregiving and self-expression and for anyone that has a complex friendship that has weathered several iterations of you both, this deeply personal piece will resonate.

Certainly every mother, artist or otherwise, will identify with this touching musical play and feel seen, but parent or not, Forget-Me-Not will not be forgotten soon by any audience member lucky enough to catch this Fringe gem before their run ends on 9 August.

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