The paper presents the process of rewriting a real story of 1960ies state surveillance tied to the Budapest Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, the transformation of a real story into a fictional play, and the resulting insights into the relationship between the Academy and state surveillance. One of the key theses of the text is that certain similarities appear between the practices of the surveillance agent’s handler and the traditions of socialist realist theatre, as it often happened that state surveillance, despite its intention to reveal reality, shaped its practice alongside the project of constructing a reality.