Portrush’s amateur pantomime tradition started as a church fundraiser, ran for decades, vanished entirely for twenty years, and then came back.
A church fundraiser that stuck
It began in 1952, when Holy Trinity Church needed money for its Sunday School. Church members formed the Ballywillan Drama Group and staged Red Riding Hood on 18 December that year — 17 actors and 18 dancers, written and produced by Cecil Burleigh and O’Hara Logan — raising £70 for the cause. It clearly struck a chord: Coronation year 1953 brought an Empire-tour Revue, Cinderella in 1954 was popular enough that its run was extended, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves followed in 1955.
Names recur across the decades in a way that says something about a small town’s theatre culture: Audrey Logan played Principal Boy for seven years running, and Jack Magill played the Dame across ten separate productions.
From the Town Hall to Waterworld
Ballywillan’s 1990 production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin turned out to be its last in the Town Hall — Coleraine Council closed the building as structurally unsafe shortly after. The group relocated to a purpose-built stage in Waterworld’s Piazza area, with director Brian Logan redesigning the sets for the new space, and continued there until Aladdin in 1995. After that, the group pivoted from pantomime to musicals, staging Oliver in 1996, and continues today at the Riverside Theatre in Coleraine — but pantomime itself disappeared from Portrush entirely for the next two decades.
The revival
Portrush Theatre Company formed in 2015 specifically to bring pantomime back, staging Cinderella in January 2016 at the newly refurbished Town Hall. Under director Andy Byrne, the company followed with Dick Whittington, Ali Baba, The Wizard of Oz, and a sold-out run of Puss In Boots in 2020 — proof that a genuinely local tradition, once broken, could still find its way back to the same stage decades later.