The Théâtre Majeste of Algiers had a magnetic pull in the 1940s. Here, audiences could indulge in tragedies of human failings, comedies riffing on European classics, moralistic one-acts preaching the evils of alcohol, or soirées of song and dance, all performed in Arabic. The different social strata of Algiers’ Arabic-speaking population rubbed shoulders at the Majeste but not everyone attended for the love of theater. Mixed among the spectators, a policeman surveilled every “Arab” theater in Algiers. Following World War II, French colonial police surveillance in Algeria increasingly focused on the threat of Algerian nationalism and policing theater proved no exception. The police assiduously investigated the contents of plays and the background of performers, seeking to determine whether a performance could be considered “purely artistic.” But what, exactly, did “purely artistic” mean? And how did the police navigate and manipulate the blurry boundary between politics and artistic expression? In the theaters, the police of Algiers sought to curate a space of encounter in which Algerian audiences could find entertainment, without imbibing political rhetoric. Using a series of French archival sources, including internal police reports, as well as memoirs and plays, my interdisciplinary research examines the tools police employed in their attempts to circumscribe Algerian cultural expression. If most police action tried to control Algerian bodies, police surveillance of theater instead attempted to produce “pro-French” art that could influence Algerian loyalties, a cultural civilizing mission carried out by the unlikely figure of the beat cop. Ultimately, their mission failed. Unlike words on a page or paintings in a gallery, live performances presented an opportunity for spontaneity and improvisation that revealed the weakness of French policing tactics. Though the police could plan and prevent, in the end, what happened in the theater could not always be controlled, complicating the current scholarship’s ideas about omnipresent colonial police power. In trying to separate art from politics, the police created an impossibly capacious idea of the political, giving officers justification for inserting themselves into intimate moments of daily life. The personal, the interpersonal, and the artistic became a realm of police intervention, an unexpected encounter with the state. In this paper, I argue that policing theater was more than a battle against Algerian Nationalism. It was an attempt to shape cultural tastes, and a failed civilizing mission that reveals the limits of colonial police power.