The Overcoat

It is one of theatre's most inviolate truths that any play toying with the idea that the poor and ugly will remain downtrodden is timeless – and so it proves with this energetic updating of Gogol's parable. Here, the crushing bureaucracy of 19^th century St Petersburg is swapped for the last 50 years of Edinburgh's banking history. Sadly, the idea of an uncaring machine full of human cogs spluttering towards excess rings equally true today.

Akie McKakie is the owner of the titular garment. We follow him as he moves unspeaking from the "You've never had it so good" days of Harold Wilson in the 1960s, through the loadsamoney 1980s, to the Zen management styles and financial crash of the last decade.

Throughout, McKakie quietly works industriously in the shadows, wearing the same tattered overcoat, never advancing while his more brash colleagues profit at his expense. It is only when he buys into the glittery excess of the banking lifestyle, via an £8000 Armani overcoat, that things start to change for him – but only a crash awaits.

Catherine Grosvenor's adaptation laces its acerbic social comment with lashings of humour. Each era is marked with a wink via mullet haircuts, MC Hammer and the confusing arrival of the internet. The complex financial models that have sunk nations are wholly mocked and the six performers on stage perform all 40 characters with spirit.

The adaptation's frothiness sometimes gets in the way of real punches being landed. Bank fat cats are too easily satirised and the ending jars. Still, it is a unwelcomely prescient but very enjoyable update.