Adapting a model from cultural studies, the paper explores anew the interface between lived experience, texts and discourses, and the surrounding social context; it examines a 2005 Egyptian theatrical performance performed against the background of a watershed controversy that polarized the Egyptian nation's politico-cultural landscape. The centre of the controversy was none other than the idea of the Veil (hijab) as an essential cornerstone of the Muslim faith, but also as a badge of membership in an all-out Islamist oppositional movement seeking to challenge the hegemony of Egypt’s long-entrenched "Westernised" elite. This paper does not take a position for or against the veil, but rather explores how a number of performative cultural texts negotiate their surrounding realities by adding hitherto unforeseen dimensions to it. I will begin by a brief discussion of a number of cultural texts, including Hossam El-Haj’s 2007 video song Ethagepty, Bravo alaiki (“You’ve donned the Veil, Bravo for you!”) and Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni’s November 2006 statements criticizing the Veil along with their political and cultural fallout. Using these texts as performative background, I will focus in this paper on playwright Lenin El-Ramly’s Ekhlao El-Aqnea’a (Masks off!), directed by El-Ramly himself in a low-budget production that premiered in 2005. Far from limiting himself to a reductive discussion of the Veil as such, I argue, El-Ramly uses echoes from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to expose the upsurge of Wahabist Islam within the contemporary Egyptian cultural landscape. Such influences, according to the secular Muslim playwright, have only resulted in a dangerous phantasmagorical appearance of a virtuous society but which masks a thinly-veiled reality of ongoing decline.