This exploration of theatre as a ‘political poetics’ is based on a methodology developed through the study of theatre in Chile in the period of the Pinochet regime (1973–1989), and uses this as a way of reading the theatre of the transition and return to democracy. The understanding of a series of spaces that theatre negotiates, manipulates and occupies is seen to allow access to the fissures between these spaces. The essay explores the way these gaps might give access to a range of presences and absences in the dominant discourse, especially the national narrative around the historical present of the regime and the return to democracy. It is an exploration that leads to an unexpected insight into a central absence in the poetics of the stage during the dictatorship.