Gëzim Alpion: If Only the Dead Could Listen
Gëzim Alpion: “Happy to announce the release of the new American edition of my play on immigration. A huge thank you to the team at Globic Press for their outstanding work and dedication in bringing this edition to life”.
New 2026 edition · Drama
Gëzim Alpion
If Only the Dead Could Listen
Two exiles. One interview room. No easy answers.
A Kosova Albanian asylum seeker and the Albanian-born interpreter assigned to his case collide in a British police station in a darkly comic, ultimately tragic play about exile, prejudice and dignity.
A police interview that becomes a reckoning
Who would have thought that a trip to Harrods would end in a night in the cells?
Leka Trimi, a Kosova Albanian, is an intelligent, educated man with a dark secret. Having escaped the horrors of his homeland, he is now in custody at a police station near London. His only hope is Alma Stone, born Alma Gurabardhi in Tirana, a researcher who has built a new life in Britain and has little patience for the refugees from the country she left behind.
What begins as a routine interview becomes a charged, darkly funny and finally devastating encounter between two exiles who have made very different peace with leaving home. Blending black comedy, epic tragedy and bureaucratic absurdity, If Only the Dead Could Listen brings the asylum debate down to the level of individual lives, and lets no one off easily.
First staged at the MAC Theatre in Birmingham in February 2006 with support from Arts Council England, the play prompted packed post-show discussions and coverage in the British, Albanian and Kosovar press. Twenty years after its world première, its questions about migration, assimilation, nationalism and prejudice, including prejudice within immigrant communities, remain strikingly relevant.
