Fire-ravaged La Mama theatre ready to rebuild after raising $3.1m

When Betty Burstall, a young Melbourne teacher, put her name on the lease of an old underwear factory in Faraday Street, Carlton, she was thinking of New York City.

It was 1967. Burstall had recently visited the States, and been fired up by the creative energy of the tiny theatres tucked inside coffee houses, and she wanted to recreate that energy in Australia. Rent was $28 a week. In a homage to the La MaMa in Greenwich Village, she named this factory – her new theatre – La Mama.

The main performance space at La Mama was an empty room, just 8m x 9m. It would go on to be one of the most important theatres in Australia. For half a century, that factory in Faraday Street hosted thousands of shows, parties, readings and events. It was a space for young artists who grew up to be stars – playwright Patricia Cornelius, actor Richard Roxburgh, author Alexis Wright. So when the theatre burnt down last year in a catastrophic fire, it affected so many people in the theatre community that when its management announced their determination to rebuild, they flocked to help – and donate the $3m required to make it happen.

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Carlton was a very different part of the city in the early days of the theatre. “It was a much more grunge student dominated suburb,” says Liz Jones, who was appointed La Mama’s artistic director in 1973 and remained so ever since. “A lot more artists could afford to live in Carlton in those days!”

Burstall used her teacher’s salary to bring together “anyone who had experience of trying to write for actors”. One of these would be playwright David Williamson, an engineering student who had written for university revues. His first short plays were staged at La Mama in 1970, and the enduring classic The Removalists premiered the following year. (He offered Don’s Party, but they thought it was “very middle class” and turned it down.)

“The space created me,” Williamson tells Guardian Australia. “There is no other way to put it.

“There was no film industry, there was no representation of [Australian] life on stage at all.”

The major theatre companies at the time – Union Theatre Repertory Company (later renamed Melbourne Theatre Company) and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust – both had an emphasis on British plays. Burstall found this scandalous.

“The younger generation can’t comprehend how angry we were, that we were locked out of our own culture,” Williamson says. “And how angry Betty was.”

La Mama’s Faraday St building stood, virtually unchanged, for over 50 years. Set back from the road, you walked through a car park, past the corrugated iron fence into a small courtyard. A fire was lit on Melbourne’s chilly nights. With your ticket, you were given a raffle ticket, and were invited to stay after the show to have a coffee and talk with the artists.

The performance space, too, had idiosyncrasies: an open fireplace, a working sink, a rickety wooden staircase. In 2008, the company fundraised $1.8m to buy the building.

When, in May last year, a catastrophic fire erupted from an electrical fault, Jones was on site almost immediately. The theatre was all but destroyed: just the external brick walls remained. It took six months for her to return again to the site “without a pounding heart”.

Now, the theatre is set to rise, Jones says, “like a phoenix from the ashes”. On Thursday, the company is announcing that between government, philanthropists, and everyday donations, they have hit that $3m target to rebuild.

Victoria’s minister for creative industries, Martin Foley, first visited the site the afternoon of the fire, and arranged a relief package of $150,000 to help staff manage the rebuilding project while also continuing their programming at their second venue, La Mama Courthouse, and the local library.

Foley said in a statement: “It’s been a tough year for the La Mama team but today we look to the future, to seeing the theatre rise from the ashes and to the exciting next stage.”

The state government provided an additional $1m after its initial relief package towards the rebuild. A philanthropic alliance, which Foley describes as “unprecedented”, gave another $1m and $750,000 came from insurance.

The community gave money, too: $215,345 came from ordinary members of the public. Others threw themselves into campaigning.

Comedian Judith Lucy started working for the theatre in 1989, an “unbearable drama student” new to Melbourne from Perth. She worked front of house and then performed her first two shows there – the first, of course, with a performance poet. She also became one of the public faces of the fundraising campaign.

Lucy says she wasn’t surprised by people’s generosity in response to the appeal. “La Mama isn’t a building. It’s the community that makes La Mama,” she says. “It’s a very rare thing and it’s helped so many people.”

Jones describes La Mama as “an artist-led organisation” – a space where thousands of creative types have had the chance to experiment, fail or thrive on their own terms.

Playwright Zoey Dawson is one such artist. When she heard of the fire, she was left with a feeling of disbelief. “It felt like a place that would be fireproof somehow just from the sheer force of its history,” she says.

Dawson moved to Melbourne in 2005, and La Mama was deeply embedded in the theatre culture of the city. Seeing new and experimental work, she says, showed her “there is more theatre could be doing. There is more that I could do.”

This story repeats itself through the generations. When performance maker Maude Davey first went to La Mama in 1983, the space made her “think about performance in a completely different way.” In 1967, Williamson says, the theatre “was a revelation”.

Even the architect leading the rebuild has a history with the theatre. Meg White worked at La Mama as a stage manager, a performer, a venue manager, and a theatre designer, before finding a new path in architecture.

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The existing building will be internally rebuilt in “very particular ways”, Jones says – the fireplace and the staircase will return. But they will also construct a second building, with new office and rehearsal space. They will also, now, be able to make the building completely accessible.

For anything – let alone a theatre – to survive 50 years with its spirit unchanging is remarkable. This spirit of La Mama, Jones says, “is the energy that comes from people exploring new ideas and trying something for the very first time, because that’s what basically happens at La Mama.

“And mostly doing it on the smell of an oily rag. And that’s as it was then, and then pretty much as it is now.”