Tanta llKettan is a prominent Egyptian public sector company with ten factories across 74 feddans, specializing in oils, paints, and wood products. Established in 1954 during Egypt's post-colonial era, it was part of the Nasserite' socialist' experiment (1954-1970). In the early 2000s, discussions regarding privatization began, culminating in its privatization in 2003 as part of the Economic Reform and Structural Readjustment Program (ERSAP), driven by the state, IMF, and World Bank. This privatization was promoted as a path to economic development, with public sector mismanagement blamed for its financial losses and inefficiencies. Timothy Mitchell's concept of the novel 'dreamland' decade characterized the 1990s when Egypt embraced neoliberalism. The overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 sparked hope for change, leading Tanta llKettan workers to challenge the privatization in the Egyptian Council of State court. In September 2011, the court ruled to revoke the privatization due to corrupt deals. This paper rethinks the state as a coherent body, tracing the different faces of the state and how they unfold to Tanta llKettan's workers. I examine different ethnographic scenes to follow the state's absences, presences, and fragmentations that were manifested within specific moments of the labor movement. Tracing state incoherence, workers experience state experimentation as it emerges in theatrical and performative modalities. I analyze the juxtaposition of instances where securitization is heightened and others where the state acts out the role of the heroic workers' rights defendant, temporarily rupturing state-capital wedlock. I argue that these temporal ruptures were not moments exemplary of severance in the normalized capital logic of operations within state institutions. Yet, the performance itself is important in understanding the state's various strategies to disperse workers’ factory occupation. How this rupture halts the labor movement is not only limited to securitization or policing but also includes creating rifts between workers, invoking fear through suspensions and terminations, and finally, offering (forcing) financial packages. The study is based on a year-long ethnography, conducted from May 2018 to May 2019, with Tanta llKettan laborers involved in the resistance movement and anti-privatization case.