Felgate had directed for the Brisbane Repertory Theatre Society, a company aimed at advanced performers. She wanted something different: a place where improving amateurs could grow by taking on serious work. Through the 1940s she hunted out new plays for them, including John Van Druten's I Remember Mama and the thriller Gas Light. The company's reach was wide. In 1962 it staged Aristophanes' ancient comedy Lysistrata in the open-air gardens of the Johnstone Gallery, with sets and costumes by the designer Quentin Hole. The gallery's owners, Brian and Marjorie Johnstone, were close allies, and out of that friendship grew an even larger ambition - a purpose-built theatre of their own, linked to the gallery by gardens, sharing a single artistic crowd.

Before a brick was laid, the company staged Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in a tent on the empty site - theatre on the ground where the theatre would stand. The new building on Cintra Road, designed by the architect Vitaly Gzell, who also served as the company's president, began construction in November 1969, and the doors opened in February 1971 with a French farce and a fairy-tale adaptation. A members' club had opened in the basement days earlier, holding one of the first late licences granted under a recent change to the liquor laws, and one newspaper columnist marvelled that it was the first place she had ever felt able to walk to the bar, order her own drink and pay for it herself. The Johnstones, delighted, lent their own paintings and sculptures to dress the rooms. It was, by any measure, a brave and enormous undertaking.

The dream nearly broke under its own cost. To chase government funding, the amateur company turned professional - but the money never came, and the building was sold to the State Government, which simply resold it to recoup what it had spent. The company that had given Brisbane decades of theatre folded at the end of 1976. When Gail Wiltshire took the building on in 1977, she inherited a debt of more than a million dollars and a theatre that had been vandalised. She later wrote that she thought of the women in her own family history - the long sea journey, the babies buried in small wooden coffins, the house with a mud floor - and decided that nothing here was too difficult. She kept it going.

What sets the Twelfth Night apart is precisely what nearly sank it. Owned by Ken and Gail Wiltshire, it takes no grant from the Queensland or federal governments, and it is the only privately owned theatre in the country. That independence has shaped a particular kind of programming - British comedy has been a mainstay, with seasons featuring stars from television favourites like Are You Being Served? and 'Allo 'Allo! drawing on the affection Australian audiences hold for those shows. Over the decades a long roll of Australian actors has passed across its stage, among them Sigrid Thornton, Frank Thring and June Salter, and its Junior Theatre Workshop trained performers who went on to professional careers. In a country where theatres lean on public money, this one has simply refused to close.