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The earliest information we have about The Club Theatre dates from 1896 when we were called The St Margaret's Church Institute Amateur Dramatics Society. The Society was born out of the Bible Reading Groups associated with the Church and they performed plays/playlets at Tea Functions. The first recorded play was at a Senior Bible Class Tea Party where there is a mention of a play but no title. At the Junior Bible Class Tea Party two days later on 15th January 1896 there is mention of a play "My Turn Next" 

The Society blossomed and continued to perform up to the 1st World War when performances were stopped until the cessation of hostilities. The stoppage was repeated during the 2nd World War and again performances continued. There were two more plays under the name of St Margaret's at which time there was a name change to The Club Theatre. It is known that many of the early plays were in fact sketches and one act plays and they were also only performed once or twice. 

Since the restart of the performances in 1947 we have grown to performing for 7 nights and producing 5 plays a season plus youth theatre events and outside lets. We have been performing at our current Theatre, which we converted from a disused Methodist chapel, since November 1962 and this has only been interrupted during the 1982/83 season when we closed for extensive re-building. We are now fortunate to have full facilities, including full size rehearsal area, bar/lounge, wardrobe facilities, all dressing facilities and all technical functions. We are looking for a builder to install elastic sides to our wardrobe room and props store as they are both overflowing.

The Theatre has been purposely kept in the traditional style with a stepped auditorium, the stage is 22 ft proscenium arch by 16 ft depth. We can accommodate 134 persons in comfy, newly refurbished theatre seats with everyone having a good view of the stage. Activities at the Theatre are various and our aim is to use the Theatre for its main purpose, performance. This is obviously limited to the time available to the stage crew and all the helpers. All help is purely voluntary but there is a very strong core of loving and caring helpers.

Included in our aims to select plays is our belief in new works and we try to include one new work each season, we firmly believe that we need to encourage new authors and new plays. Coupled with this we also run a Drama School, aged from 11 to 16 yrs. Their last production was "A Midsummer Nights Dream" which played to full houses. Each year we enter several one act festivals with the youth theatre. We used to run GCSE drama courses but we stopped when the syllabus changed from 80% performance and 20% written work to 40% performance and 60% written work. 

The Trafford Youth Theatre perform her every year and we also present the Hale One-Act Play Festival presenting 18 one act plays in 6 nights. In accordance with our encouragement of youth we are fortunate to welcome local schools for their annual shows. 

Constantly striving to improve our standards we have been fortunate to receive awards for our achievements, include one for our youth work, from both the Greater Manchester Drama Federation and the Cheshire Theatre Guild. Our play selection policy is to encourage actors, directors and would be directors to put forward projects that they would like to work on. A balanced season is created from these suggestions and the appropriate directors are chosen. We always encourage youth involvement by trying to include some of our youth group in a main production. 

Our patron is Brian Clemens, we performed the world premiere of his last play "The Devil at Midnight" to much acclaim and we are currently working on the world premiere of his latest play "Without Trace" which will be performed 14th to 20th March 2004 with Brian in attendance on the final night. The play is then being taken up for a professional presentation in London later this year. The challenge of doing a new play in front of the author, especially one so well known, is very daunting but very satisfying when it works out.