The Weaver’s Tale musical - an incredible story of how Axminster became world famous for making fine carpets! Opening night - Wednesday 1st June 2005!   Directors note - “ That’s Axminster, like the carpets”. How many of us say that every day in the knowledge that more or less anybody in the world will instantly know what we mean. Until recently however, it would seem that general awareness as to the rich and eventful past of this celebrated rural outpost has always been rather thin on the ground. This musical play explores an important part of our heritage, the history of the man who first handed the “AXE” to Axminster. It was decided some time ago that three weeks of festivities to commemorate 250 years of carpet making in Axminster were to be opened with ‘some kind of theatrical spectacle that could lend a historical context to the proceedings’. One of the initial proposals was that this should be a ‘Tale of Two Weavers’ which celebrated within the same narrative the lives of two great men; Thomas Whitty the man who initiated carpet making in Axminster, and Harry Dutfield who resurrected the industry here in the 1930s. Regrettably however, having initially been the charge of a ‘local character’, this proposal effectively sat on the shelf gathering dust for eighteen months until such point as the Weavers Committee saw fit to enlist at short notice the services of the present production team. During the past five months then, as a result of much frenzied activity and the formidable collaborative efforts of all of us who have been determined to make this unique community event a raucous success, what began as the merest seed of an idea has grown into a living, breathing spectacle that has succeeded in bringing together the members of this and surrounding communities in a project which has been exciting, informative, and above all enormously good fun. The script is completely original (courtesy of Cynthia Dunn, Chris Lane, George Dunn) and has been conceived of, written and edited entirely during the aforementioned five months. Similarly the music and lyrics (courtesy of The Walnut Weavers; Ben Stone, Tristan Massey Birch, Ben Riggs, George Dunn) is completely original (with the obvious exception of well known 18th Century dissenters hymn “I’m Going Home”) and has been written entirely for the purposes of this project during the same five months. What had seemed at the outset a fairly challenging task; to make an entertaining piece of theatre about a pious early industrialist, without completely bending the truth, very quickly proved itself to be no challenge whatsoever. The story of Thomas Whitty in the early life of the local industry that was to elevate Axminster from a bedraggled scattering of charred dwellings (courtesy of Oliver Cromwell) to a quaint, bustling Georgian market town was in itself a dramatic story waiting to be told. It has therefore not been necessary to depart significantly at any point from that which is genuinely agreed to be the case by a number of corroborating local historical sources. What has resulted is a fittingly cheerful tribute to a monumental turning point in Axminster’s history, something that really could not have been achieved by an evening of annotated lectures. We hope you enjoy the show as much as we have.