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. We have been
performing at our current Theatre since November 1962 and this was only
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. 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. 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 etc. All help is purely
voluntary but here 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, Senior and Junior
aged from 8 to 16 yrs. We have just completed our Centenary year, 1996, and by
the start of the summer close to performance, we will have completed 56
performance nights. We also have run classes for GCSE Drama due to most local
schools having dropped this from their curriculum. Unfortunately due to changes
in the curriculum we have had to drop the GCSE course. Some local groups utilise our
facilities namely coffee mornings for the local Gas Pensioners and Sunday School
for the local Baptist Church.
The Trafford Youth Theatre perform her every year and we also present the
Hale One-Act Play Festival and in accordance with our encouragement of youth we
are fortunate to welcome the Forest School for their annual show where we have
as many as 80 children up to the age of 11 yrs on stage. We regularly have
Professional entertainers in covering all types of performance but these have to
be limited due to the availability of the helpers. Over the past few years we
have also been fortunate to welcome many named artists to our stage with BBC
Radio recording sessions. Constantly striving to improve our standards we have
been fortunate to receive awards for our achievements from both the Greater
Manchester Drama Federation and the Mid-Cheshire Theatre Guild.
It is very easy to join, all you have to do is request a subscription
form and let us have your