November 2025
The November 2025 talk was given by Leslie Hooper, the son of John Hooper, who was manager of the Playhouse from 1957-72. While focussing on 1957-1964, the talk briefly covered the cinema’s history up to that point. The cinema was featured on the DDHS webbsite in 2019 – see here (good photos). Leslie Hooper sent slides from his talk with some annotation. The text below is by Leslie Hooper with additional links by Dr James Herring.
The photo above shows the cinema after its heyday. It closed for good in 1984, and was demolished in 1988, to be replaced firstly by a Health Centre, and now by the Cherry Tree Nursery. Only the lamp post remains. The Oxfam shop was originally Birrell’s then McColl’s sweet shop, with Frank Shield’s shoe shop on the left hand side. It was a magnificent art deco building, with stairs up to the foyer. You can see adverts for current films on the left of the entrance.
The photo above shows a view of the auditorium looking out from the screen. The cinema had seating for 1031 patrons, and was larger than the cinemas in North Berwick (good photo) and Penicuik (good photo), where the same films were shown each week on a rota. The huge size of the cinema for a town like Dunbar was anecdotally due to the assessors visiting Dunbar in the summer, when there were many visitors to the town, even in the 1930s.
The photo above shows a sample of cinema programme at the start of the 1950s. There were three changes of films each week, with a Saturday matinee which incorporated a children’s serial. By 1957, the children’s matinee had moved to the morning, with the cinema re-opening from 3 o’clock. Each film was shown again after it ended – continuous performance is now an alien concept to modern audiences. You can watch the official trailer to the Prisoner of Zenda, one of the films shown in the photo above, on Youtube here. A trailer for Challenge to Lassie can be seen here.
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