The Flouers o Edinburgh

How would I, as a mere Sassenach, get on with a play in Scots? The answer is very well indeed when it's as glorious as this.

I'm not saying I got every joke or understood every word but Richard Baron's sumptuous production of Robert McLellan's comedy of the Enlightenment is a rich theatrical feast, full to overflowing with outrageous performances and visual delights.

The main concern of ambitious young Edinburgh gentlemen in the 1760s was to learn to speak as the English did and thus make their way in the newly dominant culture of the Union.

Charles Gilchrist is one such and, in Grant O'Rourke's exquisitely precise performance, his gloriously mispronounced English provides some of the best comedy. However, it's the speed, vigour and naturalness of the Scots dialogue that provides the play's driving engine. Carol Ann Crawford, looking like a highly animated Alan Ramsay painting, wields her lines like weapons as her formidable Girzie Carmichael tries to match-make for her niece, Kate, get her estates back again and keep her social acquaintances under control.

As well as the English question, complicated when Simkin, a genuine English army officer, pays court to Kate, there are also politics (who can pay enough to get elected?), poetry (who should you rhyme for, Edinburgh or London?), money (see politics), land (sheep or people?), international relations (ally to France or Germany?) and always 'Whither Scotland?'.

Does that sound like a heavy meal? Well it isn't. Just look at the scene between Auchterleckie, the Scotsman who has embraced the life of the East Indies (thirteen wives) and Simkin. It shows you everything you need to know about their respective ways of regarding life through an hilarious sequence of social rituals involving port, fans, floor cushions and a hookah.

The play was written in the 1940s but it's like meeting a newly discovered Restoration Comedy. Every single member of the enormous cast plays their part to the hilt and that includes the pre-play mobile phone warning which is in Scots.

It's a production that brings its world to life, that bursts with ideas, whose almost three hours flies by, that at times had me helpless with laughter, that's extraordinarily well acted, that looks fantastic; in short, it's a real unmissable treat.