Whether set in the distant past, in a fable like setting, or contemporary Syria, political imprisonment and torture are some of the most repeated scenes in Syrian political theatre. This paper examines how the theatre has managed to depict such a fraught subject in a society that carefully polices speech, arguing that contemporary theatre makers and performance activists consciously manipulate a trope made familiar in the 1970s. In the process, I argue, these contemporary theatre practitioners both open and foreclose possibilities for revolutionary imaginings. The paper explores interrogation scenes in three recent plays, one staged several years before the current uprising and two that have been repeatedly mounted during the uprising: The Solitary (2008) by al-Khareef Troupe, Tomorrow’s Revolution is Postponed Until Yesterday (2012) by Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, and Please Look Into the Camera (2012) by Mohammad al-Attar. The Solitary repeats scenes familiar within a history of oppositional theatre but undermines the idea of meaningful political resistance by substituting the personal for the political. Tomorrow’s Revolution explicitly references Syria’s theatrical past, but transforms the cynicism of earlier works into a revolutionary imagining of a future Syria unified by global and social media rather than a dictator’s yoke. Please Look into the Camera employs verbatim theatre practice punctuating fictional narrative with language marked as “real,” forcing a greater accountability onto the audience. These works constitute a fundamental break with past theatre practice, even as their debt to theatre pioneers is manifestly evident. Lisa Wedeen has argued that the state asserts its power whenever a cultural production disingenuously announces its irrelevance to the present moment. Her argument is especially relevant to the political theatre of the 1970s. It is not that censors were oblivious to hidden meanings; rather, the shared disavowal of these meanings was itself a performance of power. We see this in the interrogation scenes in plays such as The Jester (1973), October Village (1974), and Cheers my Homeland (1978) all by Muhammad al-Maghut, The Dervish Seeks the Truth (1970) by Mustafa al-Hallaj, and The Path (1976) by Walid Ikhlasi. The repetition, across decades of similar scenes of detention and interrogation constitutes an ongoing debate about what it means to be political and how one can to achieve political speech.