The original building was an Italian Embassy ballroom opened by Princess Labia on 16 May 1949 as a theatre for the staging of live performance arts.

[6] Miknowski allowed Eric Liknaitzky to rent the theatre to screen independent arthouse films.

[6] The actor, Richard E. Grant was studying nearby at the University of Cape Town and he was a frequent patron of the cinema.

[1] Although well short of the R2,000,000 target needed, the campaign helped rejuvenate the Labia Theatre with digital projectors in all of its cinemas.

[citation needed] In February 2012, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) threatened to boycott the theatre and lodge a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) after it refused to screen the documentary Roadmap to Apartheid, which draws parallels between South African apartheid and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, due to its politically controversial nature and what appeared to the theatre's owner to be one-sidedness; the PSC alleged, however, that this was due to local Zionist lobbying, and Right2Know, who were hosting the free screening in association with the Labia and the PSC, accused the Labia of "succumb[ing] to pressure from the Zionist Federation".