When it opened on 11 June 1972, La Boite became the first purpose-built theatre-in-the-round in Australia, a 200-seat arena designed from the ground up so the play could happen in the middle of the audience rather than in front of it. Governor Sir Colin Hannah did the honours at the opening. The form was not invented here; theatres in Europe and America had been experimenting with arena staging, chasing something more intimate and immediate than the traditional picture-frame stage. But this was Brisbane's, and Queensland's, leap into that world, a deliberate bet that audiences wanted to be inside the story rather than watching it from the dark.

The design came from Brisbane architect Blair Wilson, of the firm R Martin Wilson and Sons, working with input from the theatre's artistic director, Jennifer Blocksidge. Wilson built the exterior from dark reject bricks, the kind a builder might ordinarily discard, laying them in shifting patterns so the lower walls carry a rough, deliberate texture. The work won him the 1972 Clay Brick Award for inventive use of the material. The roof is low-pitched and metal-clad. Everything about the form expresses the name: a box with softened edges, brick and concrete and timber, honest about what it is. The Queensland Heritage Register, which listed the building on 30 January 2004, singled out exactly this marriage of name and shape.

The building works across three levels. The ground floor holds the foyer, flanked by small lobbies and a ticket office, with the 200-seat auditorium behind. The seating rakes up on all sides around a central acting space, and here is the clever part: tunnels run beneath the raked seats, letting actors slip in and out and appear at any point in the room without ever being seen to walk on. There is no wing to hide in, no curtain to fall, no comfortable fourth wall between the performer and the watching faces. A play staged in this room had to work in the round, legible from every seat, intimate by force of architecture. Below the stage, a basement holds rehearsal space, a workshop, storage, offices, and dressing rooms. A gallery sits above. A brick-paved courtyard opens off the foyer, a place to gather before the lights go down.

The theatre was built for the Brisbane Repertory Theatre Company, founded decades earlier and one of the longest-running theatre groups in the state. The connection ran so deep that the company eventually took the building's own name, becoming La Boite when it incorporated. For thirty years this box on Petrie Terrace was its home, the place where it helped rejuvenate amateur and then professional theatre across Queensland, presenting the kind of modern, flexible, intimate work the arena form made possible. The company has since moved on to a newer venue, but the heritage-listed building remains, a small, stubborn monument to the night Brisbane decided to surround its actors.