San Diego

Fortunately for us, the consistently inventive Scottish playwright David Greig did not die as a result of any unprovoked attack on his recent visit to San Diego. In his play San Diego, the character David Greig, newly arrived in the city, is not so lucky.

But the real-life Greig, the author of a clutch of hugely varied plays - including The Speculator, Caledonia Dreaming and last year's Traverse and Royal Court hit Outlying Islands - not only survived his San Diego trip but has filtered his experiences and impressions of the place, its politics and its culture, all which he found "fascinating, unsettling and disorientating", into a surreal and intriguing piece of theatre.

San Diego is a series of loosely connected threads tied together by the pivotal character, the pilot of a Boeing 777, 200 series. Its capacity is 256 people, and the human mind has evolved to cope, so we're told, with a community of the exact same number of people. Since, as the play informs us, "the average child born this century will spend more of its lifetime on an aircraft than it will with its grandparents," the plane become our village, its cabin our home, its pilot our leader on this theatrical flight.

Thankfully, we don't meet the whole community of Greig's imaginary aircraft "village" but a cosmopolitan cross-section of humanity in his cleverly intersected scenarios. They involve, amongst other characters, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria (where Greig himself spent his childhood), the pilot's family - a film star son and a disturbed daughter who practises self-mutilation - a tart with a heart and a procession of people bewilderingly all called Amy.

The writing is dazzling, even if we sometimes lose our moorings, cruising around directionless like the people on an aeroplane who "need to know where they are, where they're going, and feel anxious...time and place no longer exist."

As well as dealing with trust, relationships, a search for personal identity and a morass of other underlying themes, San Diego also touches amusingly on the recording of Wings' "Band on the Run", cuing a farcical rendition of it at a cremation.

To help him to bring his characters and their often bizarre situations and encounters to jostling stage life for Glasgow's Tron Theatre Company at the Edinburgh Festival, Greig has collaborated with Marisa Zanotti, as co-director, and Simon Vincenzi, who has designed a fantastically versatile techno-chic set.

A cast of 11 succeed in individualising Greig's panoply of characters, and in addition to David Greig the playwright we also have David in Consultancy and, just to confuse matters further, David the Patient.

It's probably fair to say that the presence of Billy Boyd (changing his persona from Peregrin "Pippin" Took in The Lord of the Rings to the character of Greig himself) is a bigger draw than the name David Greig. But to be on the safe side, Vincenzi has the author's name and play title run continuously across an LCD display loop for the duration of the play, flickering in front of our eyes thousands of times.

Home and awake from the mythical dream that is San Diego, the name David Greig remains imprinted on our minds.