The chapter begins by proposing a game that invites the reader to imagine the taxonomy of the political theatre, which while impossible is nevertheless implicit in any discussion of the political theatre. This taxonomic ruse is used to develop the essay’s central thematic via an analysis of the theatre of the Russian (October) Revolution: that what the revolutionary theatre founded was nothing as solid as a tradition of political theatre, but it did inaugurate the problem of the political theatre. The chapter shows that central to this problematic is the relation of theatre to the ‘new’: to the new society it seeks to model, and how the new theatre must be related to the old theatre that preceded it (whether articulated as continuity or radical epistemic break). It argues that the dialectic of the new constitutes the central paradox of the political theatre that can be pursued as a genealogy of the problem of the political theatre. The chapter examines this problematic as it emerges in several key controversies that permeate the revolutionary discourse on political theatre – from Rolland, Meyerhold to Lunacharsky and others involved in debates around ‘Proletkult’ (proletarian culture). It describes the central contradiction of the revolutionary theatre, via three tendencies: the avant-gardism of Meyerhold, the ‘Agitki’ theatre of troupes such as the Blue Blouse, and the ‘spectacular’ statist theatre of Evreinov, arguing that the political theatre in its classical phase was predicated on a contradictory need to reconcile propagandistic function with the experimentalism of a ‘new’ theatre.