A THEATRE artist who tragically lost her best friend in the Lockerbie bombing has said it is a “great gift” to be able to bring a play about her experience to the Edinburgh Fringe stage next month.
Annie Lareau was studying theatre at Syracuse University in 1988 when she came over to London with her fellow students for a semester abroad.
Her classmates were booked onto Pan Am 103 to travel home for Christmas. Lareau – who was booked onto a plane the following day – desperately tried to book herself onto the same flight, having wanted the comfort and company of her friends following a series of panic attacks and nightmares about flying.
Having had an expensive weekend in Paris, she was unable to afford the flight change and so instead waved off her friends – of which there were eight including her best friend Theodora Cohen – for what turned out to be the last time. Thirty-five students from Syracuse University were on the flight in total.
More than 30 years on from the tragedy which saw Pan Am 103 explode over Lockerbie following a terrorist attack, Lareau is now bringing her play called Fuselage to the Edinburgh Fringe stage to tell her story.
She said it meant a great deal to be able to debut the play in Scotland where she said she feels “safe and understood”.
“The reason I was drawn to doing it in Edinburgh first is because Scotland is very embedded in this story,” she told the Sunday National.
“It is part of your history. It’s in your bones as it is in mine.
“In my country [Pan Am 103] has been usurped by 9/11. People don’t remember it.
“I feel like it’s a great gift to do this show in Scotland first because I feel safe and understood.
The Lockerbie bombing – more commonly referred to in the US as Pan Am 103 – has come into sharp focus this year with two docudramas on Sky and the BBC telling the story of the ongoing search for the bomber.
But since Lareau, now 57, began writing a memoir in 2019 following the 30th anniversary of the disaster, she has been keen to share her more personal story of losing people she loved so suddenly.
It was in 2019 that she also visited Lockerbie for the first time, a place she says she now feels “intricately connected to” after striking up friendships with people involved in the aftermath.
“It took 30 years to happen, but my story and their story are the same, even though we are across the pond. Our grief is similar in the fact that we are forever connected,” she said.
While both the Sky docudrama Lockerbie: A Search for Truth and the BBC series The Bombing of Pan Am 103 both focused on the who bombed the plane and the geopolitics of the time, Lareau said she wanted to focus on the humans who were lost and the opportunities that were taken from them.
Lareau said: “For me it’s such a personal story. I lost eight friends, I’ve lived through the aftermath, and I have to live it every time I see one of those documentaries.
“I was really motivated to write the memoir to tell the story of the people, the human lives we sometimes forget. We get desensitised in our world by the news, we just see a roll call of names.
“What I want people to remember is them [her friends] and our story and how it’s all so relatable because we all lose people throughout our lives and mine just happened to be in the lens of an international tragedy.
“It's about trying to remind people of the vibrancy of the people we come into contact with in our lives and how precious and how fragile they are and how we should cherish them while we have them because you never know when they are going to disappear.”
In the aftermath she said she took a “deep, dark dive” mentally as she battled with a huge sense of guilt. She had to face the agony of packing up her best friend and roommate Theo’s belongings back at Syracuse, with the media banging on her door.
She said while she will likely never find complete closure, she has healed gradually over the years and part of that has been making the most of the “gift” she was given.
“When we got back to university and graduated, we wasted no time in trying to do what we wanted to do because we knew the gift we had been given,” she said.
“There was no being afraid of going to auditions or becoming Broadway producers – which two of them have become. They were just willing to take the risk because there was an understanding we were lucky and we had to do it not only for us but for them, who lost that opportunity to do what they wanted with their lives.”
The show Fuselage brings Lareau’s story together with the story of those in Lockerbie who watched as the plane wreckage crashed down on their town, killing 11 people on the ground alongside the 259 people on board.
“I take you back to 1986 and the start of university where you meet my friends,” she said.
“I take you through the process of meeting them and that becomes intertwined with the story of 2019 when I go to Lockerbie for the first time in 30 years and I meet Colin Dorrance and Josephine Donaldson who were both involved in the situation.
“It switches back and forth and how those stories meet.
“Then I take you through the aftermath, what happened in Lockerbie, what happened for me, and how my time in Lockerbie in the following years sort of healed us all.”
Lareau added: “I absolutely hope it will tour, and I can show it to other people across the UK and Europe and the US, and I hope someone will publish by memoir, but if none of those things happen, I will be okay with just performing in Scotland, because that is the most important thing to me.”
Fuselage will be performed throughout August at Pleasance Courtyard. For tickets click here.
