Governance theatre is governance built to be shown rather than run. An AI policy is approved, an ethics committee is chartered, a set of principles is published, and the board minutes record that AI governance is in place. None of it produces a record of the AI systems being checked, stopped or changed.
It usually starts with fear. A board that feels exposed asks for something it can approve by the next meeting, and a document is the fastest thing to produce. The common forms are recognisable: principles that tell nobody what to do differently, a committee whose approval rate is close to 100%, a risk register in which every AI risk is amber, and a human reviewer who signs off hundreds of decisions a day and rejects almost none.
Three questions expose it quickly: show the record that the control ran last month, name the person who can stop the system and when they last did, and show a finding that changed something. Theatre survives a board meeting, which asks whether a thing exists, and fails an audit, which asks whether it worked.