an inspector calls, hotfoot from London

And if prestige Scottish casts abroad are your thing, you won't find much more prestigious than the one they've been fielding at Islington's Almeida Theatre for the past couple of months. Even the smallest role in The Government Inspector, as translated with fizz and zest by John Byrne, is taken by the kind of actor who you'd normally expect to be leading the company. Among their number are Ian McDiarmid (Return of the Jedi), Tom Watson (Cardiac Arrest), Brian Pettifer (Hamish Macbeth), Moray Hunter (Absolutely), Terry Neason (Piaf), and Kathryn Howden (Herald Angel award winner). There are twice as many again - all of them as impressive Having completed two months in London, Jonathan Kent's production is calling into the Edinburgh King's Theatre tonight for a one-week run - its only Scottish dates. Actor Stuart McQuarrie, yet another star amid a stellar cast, says he can't wait to play John

Byrne's vigorous translation in front of a home crowd. It's not that London audiences haven't appreciated the witty badinage in this exuberant comedy, it's just there are subtleties that only a native would spot.

''I think English and Scottish audiences are absolutely different,'' says McQuarrie, a veteran of 14 Royal Lyceum shows, and many a memorable Traverse role, including the eczema-suffering Leonard in Simon Donald's The Life of Stuff, and the ever-skint Charlie in Chris Hannan's Shining Souls. ''Here in London, audiences seem to be slower. When I did The Life of Stuff in Scotland people just laughed and clapped, but when we brought it down here there was a stunned silence, because they thought it was so shocking. It was the same with Shining Souls. They don't feel at ease laughing at that kind of pain.''

He adds: ''Also their humour's not as dry. They get it, but they don't think it's very funny when people are sarcastic, which in Scotland people do love. It's an appalling generalisation, but here they like more knockabout humour.

''In The Government Inspector there are brilliant lines like, 'He's off to visit St Basil the Clype', and one person in every three shows laughs. They don't know what a clype is. I thought that was a hysterically funny line, and I really want it to get a belter because I think it deserves it. It's a shame the audience can't have a script after seeing it, because some of the lines are brilliant.''

In The Government Inspector, McQuarrie plays Dobchinsky, one of the villagers in a Russian backwater not a million miles from Paisley, alarmed that a newly arrived Moscow official will expose the petty corruption that is endemic in the town. Shoulder to shoulder with Moray Hunter's Bobchinsky, McQuarrie is half of the dumb double-act that sets Gogol's comedy of mistaken identity in motion.

It's a typically funny performance by McQuarrie, an actor who has cross-dressed in Charlie's Aunt, impersonated Oliver Hardy in Laurel and Hardy, and played a stand-up comic in The Comedians. As genial on-stage as off, he's a warm-hearted performer, a master of the double-take, and his feel for the rhythms of comedy are innate.

Not so, says McQuarrie. It's not just that he's done as many serious roles as comic - John Clifford's Ines de Castro, and James Kelman's Hardie and Baird among them - it's also that he doesn't buy the idea that a feel for comic timing is any different to a feel for the beat of any other sort of drama.

''I'm happiest doing comedy and drama combined,'' he says. ''To me Shining Souls was just perfect - the way you get the comedy out is by playing it straight. That's deep joy. It's really satisfying, because it's how everything is - any feeling you have has got both sides to it. I don't think there's such a thing as comic rhythm, I think that's all hogwash. When I did TV early on in Scotland, they'd go on about the 'rule of three' - it's true to a certain extent, but that's when you're shouting at the audience. You can make an audience laugh - 'Ba-boom, that's the punchline!' - but there's nothing necessarily funny about it. There is such a thing as timing, but you can't do the same thing every night, it changes depending on the audience.''

Having made the move to London a little over a year ago with his actress wife Sharon Maharaj, McQuarrie's biggest hassle on leaving Scotland has been trying to get their three children into their preferred school. When they first moved, they were comfortably within the right catchment area. Then the boundary line shifted. So much for parental choice. Apart from that, the move south has been untraumatic, and, if nothing else, it means McQuarrie doesn't have to travel to and from Scotland to get work. ''I'm certainly getting more varied work, and more television,'' he says. ''London's just another city and, after convincing the children, it was easy.''

Still, the streets of London are not paved with gold, and well-paid work is hard to come by. The Almeida has an enviable reputation for attracting leading lights (next week Pirandello's Naked is opening with Juliette Binoche and Liam Neeson in the leads) , but it has an equal reputation for paying unstarry wages. ''Anything that's ever paid any decent money in theatre has been work I'd rather not have done,'' laughs McQuarrie, whose passion is new writing. ''The Almeida is the happening theatre in London, it's attracting extraordinary people, and it's a fantastic place to work. I'd rather be doing work that I like than earning a fortune at stuff that I can't bear.''

n The Government Inspector opens tonight at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, and runs until Saturday.