Our common language is polyphony, claims Martha Lavey (2004: xi), although we are constantly looking for the common language we lost when the tower of Babel came down. The Utvandrarna, a contemporary Swedish play at the centre of this study, supports this reading. In Utvandrarna, heteroglossia plays a prominent role in a number of narratives that the performance invites the audience to construct. When the play toured Finland, surtitling was needed even more extensively than in the original Swedish performances (to Swedish-speaking audiences) to aid discursive comprehension and through that the construction of narratives. The aim of the present study is to study the use and significance of heteroglossia and codealternation both in the characterization (auditive) and in scenography (visual) in the total experience of theatre.