Brett Randall and Hal Percy, two unemployed actors, set up the LITTLE THEATRE LABORATORY OF DRAMATIC ART in the depression year of 1931. It was a semi-professional company established with the aim of presenting plays of literary value using the best available performers. Their first production was in December, and early the following year, 1932, they established a temporary stage in a kiosk in Fawkner Park in South Yarra. The Little Theatre Laboratory began with performances for three nights every month and Sunday play readings, launched an acting school and, after over a year of operation, were so successful they needed larger premises. 

The company converted the disused ST. CHAD'S CHURCH in South Yarra into the LITTLE THEATRE. It seated one hundred and fifteen people, had a small stage only four and a half by three and a half metres, no fly area nor backstage space. The company, now renamed the MELBOURNE LITTLE THEATRE COMPANY, opened early in 1934 under Brett Randall's leadership and operated for the next twenty years. It produced three week seasons of eight plays a year, and was supported by a subscription base which finally grew to one thousand five hundred people.  It also in 1948 generated a subsidiary touring company named Everyman's Theatre.

In 1951 the administration of the company was modified and it became the Melbourne Little Theatre Guild, and in 1954 funds for the construction of a new theatre on the site were raised through a debenture issue. This new LITTLE THEATRE, which opened in August 1956, was a modern, austere looking building. It accommodated four hundred and fourteen people in fan shaped, raked seating, with a proscenium arch stage measuring eight and a half metres deep by sixteen and a half metres wide.  After the theatre's successful opening night, a suggestion to change the street name at its location from Martin Street to St. Martin's Lane, after the London theatre district, was adopted by Melbourne City Council. Six years after the opening, in August 1962 the building itself was renamed the ST. MARTIN'S THEATRE and the company became a fully professional, subscriber based organisation.

In the late 1960s the company began to run into financial difficulties. Its subscriber membership were aging and diminishing, there was competition from subsidised theatres and audience expectations were changing. The company received its first subsidy in 1969 but it was insufficient to overcome existing problems. Attempts to save the company were unsuccessful and it folded in 1974.

The Melbourne Theatre Company rented the St. Martin's Theatre until 1977, when it was purchased by the Victorian Government for use by the ST. MARTIN'S YOUTH CENTRE, Melbourne's principal youth theatre. It was refurbished and remodelled in 1982, with the addition of a second, well-equipped small performance space known as St. Martin's Two, and reopened as the ST. MARTIN'S YOUTH ARTS CENTRE. 

Source:

Philip Parsons (general ed.) with Victoria Chance, Companion to Theatre in Australia (Sydney, Currency Press in association with Cambridge University Press, 1995).