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In a dingy theatre courtyard, an old dunny was dubbed the “shame of Carlton”.
Swinging open the rotting door exposed peeling walls scrawled with graffiti; scribblers bemoaned, “Someone give me a f—ing grant!” and decried “poetry” as a bourgeois term for the elite.
Toilet-goers were subjected to ritualistic humiliation, says La Mama Theatre architect Meg White. “Everyone could hear you going for a tinkle.”
But, as with any good disaster, the cultural institution, founded in 1967, wasn’t going to let the dunny go to waste.
It has become an adapted performance platform in La Mama’s courtyard, looking out over the box office made with an old corrugated iron fence that once shielded the theatre from street view.
The exterior of the old building beside the toilet reveals the theatre’s devastating history. Distressed and darkened bricks – the cheapest money could buy when a printing office was originally built on the site in 1883 – give way to bright orange, red and grey where the theatre collapsed due to a fire.
The blaze gutted the structure in 2018, leaving a mess of twisted metal and charred timber.
But La Mama chief executive Caitlin Dullard picked through the rubble, salvaging burnt floorboards that now line the box office’s interior following the theatre’s restoration. Remnants of the destroyed theatre walls were thick with 50 years of paint, slapped on in hundreds of layers by performance groups, which were each allowed to decorate the space.
While La Mama bears the physical scars of its past, which led to a community campaign to fund a rebuild in 2019, it’s also still reeling from the fallout of missing out in 2024 for a second time on four-year operational funding from the federal government, an important source of income for most of La Mama’s life.
The financial blow prompted an existential reassessment of how the not-for-profit theatre group would operate, forcing it to halt its public performance program for 2025.
Creative Australia responded with a pilot program in 2024, giving La Mama $175,000 a year for two years (a significant reduction from its previous $300,000 annual funding, which represented about one-third of its income). The theatre also received $100,000 for its relaunched public performance program, and retains state and local government funding until 2027 (totalling about $335,000 annually).
Despite restructuring its financial model, La Mama still remains vulnerable, Dullard says.
“That is nerve-racking,” she says. “But I deal with that all day, and then all night I’m overjoyed with all of the possibility that this place brings.”
The theatre held 88 artistic residencies during its public closure in 2025, and returned this year with free coffee for audiences attending live performances. It’s apt, then, that La Mama features in this year’s Open House Melbourne program, which is themed around a “generous city”.
“Our model is that 80 per cent of the box office, minimum, goes to artists,” says Dullard, gesturing around the theatre’s new building, which invites people in off Faraday Street.
The theatre continues to advocate to all levels of government for more secure financial support for the independent theatre scene, which is “the backbone of culture in this country”, Dullard says. “If that grassroots level isn’t supported, the whole thing collapses.”
Architect Meg White says that for all the devastation it caused, the fire has allowed La Mama to improve accessibility, and expand in ways it otherwise never could.
On a Friday in June, actors are rehearsing in the theatre space. One woman is putting on make-up, and shouts down from the sunlit dressing room, “Three minutes, and I’ll be ready!”
Kristian Connelly, chief executive of Cinema Nova around the corner, says La Mama should be recognised for its long history of elevating talented people that Australia now views as important cultural identities.
“Since the venue was damaged by fire in 2018, it has had a challenging eight years,” Connelly says. “I’d love to see La Mama back on its feet again, for a new generation of theatre audiences to enjoy and fresh voices to benefit from.”
It’s a mission La Mama is hellbent on continuing. And on this Friday in June, the actor – curly haired, freckled – takes her position downstage, smiling under blue and green lights. The show must go on.
Tours will run at La Mama Theatre as part of the Open House Melbourne Weekend on July 25, 2026. Event details are available on the website.
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