THEATRE / A dog's life: Richard Loup-Nolan on Mongrel's Heart at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh

It's taken nearly 70 years for Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 novella The Heart of a Dog to reach the British professional stage - as Mongrel's Heart, a new adaptation by Stephen Mulrine. For 62 of those years, the work was suppressed in the USSR and you can see why.

Bulgakov barks and snaps at the trouser-leg of 1920s Soviet political correctness by inventing a piece of cavalier eugenics, by which a non-Bolshevik professor stitches up a stray mongrel with human testicles and pituitary gland. The dog quickly morphs into a humanoid with anarchic tendencies.

Bill Paterson returns to Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum to play the mongrel, Citizen Polygraph Polygraphovitch Poochikov, and his performance may well be remembered as one of the best of his life. Paterson leads us into the play on four legs, a shivering street cur on the pavements of midwinter Moscow, buffeted by the blocks of overcoated humanity sent flying this way and that by director Mark Wing-Davey across designer Claudia Mayer's modernist set.

He growls out his grievances until he is tempted into professor Preobrazhensky's care by a Polish sausage. Stephen MacDonald as Preobrazhensky and Angus Wright as his assistant Bormenthal keep very creditable straight faces at the heart of this manic farce.

Preobrazhensky is an arrogant Menshevik, occupying seven rooms in a Moscow where 'not even Isadora Duncan has a dining room'. His lifestyle is a constant affront to the ideologically sound residents' committee upstairs, led by the preposterous Shvonder (Gordon Anderson). Anderson and his two associates, Tam Dean Burn and Valerie Edmond, create a collective comic cameo of delightful precision, and with all the stupid energy of Monty Python. The other cameo roles are equally enjoyable, from Billy Riddoch's crotch-scratching government official more than happy with his genital repairs, to Derek Anders' tottering, crazy- bearded Fyodor.

Mongrel's Heart does not really find its feet until Paterson loses his front paws and becomes the scabrous Poochikov, with his foul-mouthed love for vodka and hatred of all things feline. It's impossible to resist Paterson's hilarious performance, in which he clearly relishes every belch.

Unfortunately, Bulgakov does not fully develop the story's farcical and satirical possibilities. Poochikov's anarchic behaviour can be all too easily explained by him having been mistakenly given the balls and brain of a drunken pub balalaika player rather than a Spinoza. Also, despite putting him under the influence of Shvonder and his ideologue stooges, Bulgakov chooses to concentrate on Poochikov's disruption of Preobrazhensky's surgical practice rather than any political betrayals of his new-found friends.

Nevertheless, Mulrine's adaptation rattles along in a fresh, modern vernacular, so that the thinness of Bulgakov's comic invention is noticeable only in retrospect. But, without any disrespect to the rest of the cast, it is Bill Paterson's marvellous performance that will linger longest in the memory.

'Mongrel's Heart' runs to 30 April. Booking: (031 229 9697)