The National Theatre operated differently from Western models. In Somali theatrical tradition, music and dramatic performance are inseparable, and the performing companies were called bands rather than ensembles. The most celebrated was Waaberi, formed from the merger of the Radio Mogadishu band and the General Daud military band, named after Daud Abdulle Hirsi. Its roster included legends of Somali music: Abdullahi Qarshe, Magool, Maryam Mursal, Ali Feiruz, and Hassan Sheikh Mumin. Other bands included Horseed, which predated independence under the name Ex-bana Estro, along with Halgan, Onkod, and Iftin. Each band was attached to a state institution. Iftin, for example, belonged to the Ministry of Education and was responsible for the musical training of school teachers. The theatre was a cultural ecosystem, not merely a venue.

Under Siad Barre's socialist government, the National Theatre was tasked with helping build a new society that transcended Somalia's clan divisions. The artists took that mission seriously, developing an aesthetic program that outlived the regime's own commitment to its ideals. Where Barre's policies increasingly contradicted their stated aims, the theatre pursued what has been described as an aesthetic of radical equality: the principle that political equality could emerge from the shared experience of performance. Plays combined verse and prose, with prose sections left open to improvisation. Actors received only the outline of certain scenes and filled in the rest spontaneously. The audiences were equally unrestricted. Educated elites sat alongside people with no formal schooling, pastoralists alongside urbanites. Performances toured to provincial centers, reaching farmers and herders in rural areas.

When the civil war erupted in July 1991, the National Theatre was among the first casualties. After the initial performances in the damaged building, the space fell silent entirely. The ruins served as a weapons stockpile. In the fall of 2011, Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle of the Centre for Research and Dialogue Somalia began gathering former theatre artists to plan a revival. After provisional repairs, a reopening ceremony was held on March 19, 2012, broadcast on national television. About a thousand spectators came to see Dardaarwin Walid, a new play written collectively by former band members. The title translates to Parents' Advice. Just weeks later, on April 4, 2012, a suicide bomber attacked a celebration at the theatre, killing ten people. Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility. The building that had survived the civil war's opening salvos could not escape the war's long aftermath.

Despite the bombing, the theatre's director Abdiduh Yusuf Hassan pressed forward with a program called Hirgeli Hamigaaga Faneed, meaning Awaken Your Inner Artist, essentially a Somali talent show designed to rebuild the country's performing arts from the ground up. In 2013, Hassan supported a reopening ceremony for the National Theatre of Somalia in Exile in Vienna, extending the institution's reach to the Somali diaspora. That same year, the Somali and Chinese governments signed a cooperation agreement for a five-year national recovery plan that included the reconstruction of the National Theatre, a hospital, and Mogadishu Stadium. The theatre's story mirrors its country's: repeated destruction, repeated attempts at revival, and the stubborn belief that culture is not a luxury to be restored after peace arrives but a tool for building it.