idea #2

And another idea, not to do with script but still to do with 'other' languages. How about we create a collection/archive of voices using this method:

1. Seek out participants who live in the UK or US but grew up in another country speaking a language other than English. (Or, to include people from the Caribbean or other parts of the English-speaking world, a very different variety of English.)

2. Ask them to record something of their choice in their other language - they can choose what it is provided that isn't too long and is meaningful to them: a childhood rhyme, a poem they memorised, a joke, a story, etc.

3. Ask them also to talk about what they have chosen (in English). Perhaps they would talk about why the material they have chosen has to be in the other language - what its associations are - what happens if you try to translate it.

4. The two spoken texts become a single one through editing - a text and its commentary, perhaps, but in spoken form.

5. We might initially think that the people whose voices we are hearing are themselves being presented as exiles. But it slowly emerges that *we*, the audience, are going into exile through our contact with the material - we find that we are on the outside and looking in to a range of material that is important to our speakers and just out of our own reach.