This paper investigates the relevance of speech acts to the translation of drama. The author starts off by discussing some basic principles involved in the study of speech acts. Then, she proceeds to examine the sociocultural rules that govern the acts of complaints, requests, apologies and compliments, illustrating the discussion with examples from Autumn and Winter and Munich-Athens, two plays by Swedish playwright Lars Norén. The author concludes by a more general discussion of language particular problems related to speech acts likely to give rise to problems in the translation of drama from Swedish to English.