The incensed actors gathered at the Church Coffee Tavern opposite under the chairmanship of Heys on 24 October and formed themselves into an independent dramatic literary company which they decided to call the Garrick Society.

[3] It was decided that the production in rehearsal would be the first play presented by the new society and a semi-professional director, Ryder Boys, was engaged to produce the work at the Mechanics Institute at the end of February and the beginning of March 1902.

However, the seasons of plays continued throughout, boosted it would seem by an influx of members of Stockport Operatic Society who had ceased to function for the time being, enabling the Garrick to put on several Gilbert and Sullivans and a couple of other operas.

After the war, a general sense of exhaustion and depression seemed to have set in, relieved somewhat by the 50th-anniversary celebrations in 1951 and even more so by the extensive rebuilding and refurbishment work in 1962, necessitated and financed by the local council's compulsory purchase of a "slice" of the building to enable the widening of Exchange Street.

From the outset the Garrick Theatre has often been adventurous in its choice of plays, with a particular love of Shakespeare which continues to this day (recently being involved with the RSC's Open Stages project), early productions of Ibsen, Shaw, Synge, Yeats, Hauptmann and Tagore gradually giving way in the middle years of the century to the more frivolous offerings of Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Alan Melville and the like.

After the radical shift in theatrical tastes caused by the 1956 production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger the Garrick gradually began to come up to date with productions of Osborne himself, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Wesker, Arthur Miller, David Hare and Simon Gray whilst continuing to lighten the mix with Alan Ayckbourn, popular West End hits and the occasional musical when the membership's talents lay in that direction.

In the 1980s and '90s a number of amateur premieres were secured, including A Little Night Music (Sondheim & Wheeler), My Mother Said I Never Should (Charlotte Keatley), Corpse (Gerald Moon), Fools and Star-Spangled Girl (both by Neil Simon) and also from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s the theatre took several productions on tour to Buxton Opera House, the Isle of Man Festival, the Dundalk Festival in Eire, several venues in the U.S. and also two trips to Stockport's twin town in Germany, Heilbronn.