For a country without much dramatic heritage of its own, Scotland does a fair old job of plundering everyone else's.

Molière has been a particular favourite for the past 60 years, ever since Robert Kemp wrote Let Wives Tak Ten, a Scots version of the original L’École des Femmes (The School for Wives).

Several other Scottish playwrights have also had a go, but Liz Lochhead is the current leader. This version of the same play, under a new title, is her third Molière. But where Kemp never engaged with Molière's rhyming couplets, Lochhead, with her poet's passion for language, delights in the rhyme as a rich linguistic and comic resource.

Her extraordinary facility for manipulating the meter has never been bettered. She breaks lines, adds extra internal rhymes, exploits every trick in the book to make the verse sayable but maintain the comic effect. The result, in the hands of actors of the calibre of Kevin McMonagle, Maureen Carr and a luminous debut in the title role from Anneika Rose, still a student at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, has moments of pure bliss, despite an oddly stilted opening scene.

McMonagle plays Arnolphe, the middle-aged man who is so wary of women's infidelity that he determines to marry a young woman whose education, overseen by him, has kept her from the ways of the world. But young love is not so easily gainsaid and his ward, Agnes, has grown enamoured of the young Horace.

The best of the comedy arises because Horace doesn't realise that Arnolphe, a friend of his father's, is his rival for Agnes and keeps telling him of his plans.

McMonagle knows that to be truly funny you have to be absolutely serious. His increasingly desperate stratagems to frustrate the young lovers are so well calibrated that by the end a single word or gesture is enough to set off renewed gales of laughter.

Lochhead keeps the French names, and Graham McLaren, the director and designer, keeps the 17th-century costumes, even splashing a huge impression of a Rubens painting across the backdrop. But that doesn't mesh with language that is nothing if not contemporary and gender politics, in so far as they lurk in the idea of an older man keeping a younger woman in ignorance, that have hardly dated since Molière wrote them. It's almost as if McLaren simply couldn't resist the gorgeous fabrics. They look lovely but distance us from the play for no good reason.

In other respects, though, the cast and script carry it off well enough. And Lewis Howden should win some sort of prize as the most gormless servant in all theatre.

Until Saturday. Box office: 0141 429 0022. Then Perth Theatre, May 5-9, and Oxford Playhouse, May 14-17.

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