The name change says it all. In her new translation of Le Misanthrope, Liz Lochhead brings a spiky, colloquial and often delicious immediacy to Molière's comedy of morals and manners. Moving the 17th-century play into the world of media and politics in devolved Scotland, Lochhead satirises with deadly precision, casting gauze-thin veils over her references to individuals (a prolific female broadcaster is the "anti-Kirsty", for example) and archetypes. Here are a pretty blonde newsreader, an Old Etonian posh Scot, a feminist cultural commentator who is fairer to men than to other women, and even a prolific poet/playwright with some success at translating Molière. Doubtless, MSPs, TV people and hacks will be booking seats just to see if they are included.
Our misanthropic guide through this world is Alex Frew (played with gleeful mischief by Jimmy Chisholm), a well-known television presenter at Scotia Television. He is, he says, the only person "not too polite/To tell new devolved Scotland it's a bag of shite". In rhyme and pithy words, he does this to his cost.
The play's moral question - whether it is better to tell the truth and be damned, or flatter fools and flourish - is convincingly and hilariously translated into the present day. Less dramatically engaging or funny are the scenes concerned with Frew's girlfriend Celia, and her infidelity with various men who are little more than caricatures. Even these, however, are sprinkled with some fine writing and dextrous rhyming.
What really distinguishes this production, apart from Lochhead's writing, are Chisholm's performance and Geoff Rose's slick set design - a series of revolving rooms that give a true sense of different domestic spaces and a white cube art gallery. Sometimes the comic scenarios they house feel too middle of the road (this is unfortunately underlined by the use of tracks by Travis during scene changes), and I'm not sure that we root for the cuckolding Celia (played by Cora Bissett) as much as Lochhead wants us to, except in the final moments. But at its best, this is a savage look at what Scotland has become. It makes you laugh out loud - until you realise Lochhead is holding up a mirror and you are part of that unflattering reflection.
· Until April 19. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
