R. Bereson called a technique of late-nineteenth-century ceremonial rule ‘operatic state’. This means the use of the theatre, typically an opera house, for the ruler’s representation that functioned as means of announcing political legitimacy. During a performance in a royal/state opera house the audience, a target of political ideology and aesthetic recreation, was caught between the ruler’s lodge, the stage, and the content of the play. On the other hand, the audience was composed of various individuals who by going to the theater actively acquired a common grammar of behavior and often sought such occasions as rituals of self-transformation and expressions of class consciousness or an imagined political community. This presentation focuses on the first decade of the British occupation in Egypt (1882-1892). As a case study of ceremonial rule, I argue that during this period the controversial Khedive Tevfik could exercise his monarchical powers only in the field of culture. One particular feature of such restricted, symbolic rule were the selected theater plays in Arabic in the Khedivial Opera House in the hope of creating a loyal cultural expression to the dynasty. Ultimately, the performances of these plays became occasions of political demonstrations – anti-British, pro-Ottoman, or pro-khedivial. Whatever were the political sympathies of particular members of the audience, contemporary press-reports described the participants as wataniyyin, patriots, thus transmitting an idea of what I call ‘monarchical patriotism’. This peculiar means of political legitimacy and community building, as expressed in the setting of a hierarchical space – an opera house – also entailed to the formation of a new habitus that started to function as a social marker. In this way, the interplay between aesthetics, political legitimacy, and class-differentiation embodied in a new shape of taste in the laboratory of the Khedivial Opera House.