PEEBLES will stage a world premiere of Threads, the new play about women, the textile industry and knitting, by award-winning theatre company Stellar Quines later this month.

Threads takes strands of different lives and weaves them into an intricate pattern. Agnes’ story is based on the real life of a young mother in the late 1800s whose sister works in the local mill in Hawick. Desperate to feed her five children, Agnes and her sister steal no less than 479 yards yarn to sell. They are not very accomplished thieves and Agnes is sent to Jedburgh jail.

Agnes is played by multi-award winning actor Molly Innes. Annie Grace plays Mrs Gaughain who, in real life, was the owner of an Emporium on George Street selling wool and other haberdashery to the ladies of Edinburgh. The cast also includes Joanna Tope as Mary, Paksie Vernon as Lucy and Pauline Knowles as Hattie.

Projected images of mills, mill girls and the redoubtable Edinburgh Emporium form a backdrop to the live action in the play. The stories are interspersed with step dance, live music and traditional songs as the women knit together a very particular time and place in Borders history.

Writer Sylvia Dow said: “It all began with a project about women and knitting. We joined in with a knitting group in Hawick for around ten weeks. This new play weaves together some of the stories we heard there and some historical stories so that it becomes like a piece of knitting itself”.

Director Muriel Romanes added: “It is not really a conventional play – one character is talking, then another one goes back … like a conversation. I knew that, somehow, we had to evoke the sound of the machinery in the mills; I wanted the sound of the engine of the knitting, not just hand knitting but the machinery, so we came up with clogging, step dancing that kind of sound to provide those rhythms”. Sylvia said: “The songs, which arrive out of the sound of knitting, really underline the themes of the play … women, work, knitting and the whole thread of life – all with a real Borders flavour throughout.”

Threads opens at the Eastgate Theatre, Peebles on Saturday 31 October at 7.30pm

Tickets are £12, £10, £5 for schoolchildren. Available now on 01721 725777 or www.eastgatearts.com