Athol Fugard's 1974 drama Statements After An Arrest Under the Immorality Act, written in response to the miscegenation laws of Apartheid rule, juxtaposes several forms of authority with several forms of playful jouissance. Kristeva's notion of the semiotic modality, which allies sexual pleasure with prelinguistic, aural freedom, clashes in this play with mimetic representation of South Africa's police state and with the conventions of realist and non‐realist theatre forms. Kristevan semanalysis exposes the intricate dialectic of control and sexual/semiotic indeterminancy that the play exercises, and reveals how received ideas about theatrical form often fail to account for energies of liberation and restraint embedded within complex dramatic texts.