IF you're ever looking for a fortune-teller, don't go to Hamish Glen. The artistic director of Dundee Rep has been sitting on the Scottish rights to perform Bertolt Brecht's Mr Puntila and his Man Matti for some time. When he was asked by another company if he'd let them stage the same play on the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe, he weighed up the odds of it affecting his proposed production, reckoned it wouldn't, and gave them the go-ahead. The company was the Almeida, the production was directed by Kathryn Hunter, and it starred the two members of The Right Size. After Liz Lochhead's Perfect Days, it became the hottest ticket in town.

Thanks to Glen's own generosity, he has a formidable act to follow. His staging of Brecht's 60-year-old political comedy opens this week in Dundee, and transfers to Glasgow next month. A production has been on the cards for nearly 15 years, so it's all the more ironic he was pipped to the post. He first discussed the idea of a Scottish-accented translation with playwright Peter Arnott in 1985, and only now has he mustered the resources to support its 10-strong cast.

Not that Peter Arnott seems to mind. A Brecht aficionado of old, he'd rather more of the German radical's plays were performed than less. In any case, his Scottish interpretation will have a very different flavour. ''It's just weird that a play that hasn't been done at all in the 1990s in Britain is done twice back to back,'' says Arnott about this comedy in which the land-owning Puntila, played by Kern Falconer, shows himself to be decent and moral when drunk, but a capitalist swine when sober. ''It's called a Folk Play, so it has the kind of setting that I thought would respond obviously and immediately to Scots. It's about a landowner, which is a good Scottish issue, and drunkenness, which is a good Scottish issue. I've picked all my favourite words from all over Scotland. It's Brecht's version of Finland which has become my version of Never-Never Land Scotland.''

Drawing out the knock-about comedy and the lyricism of the original, Arnott has used the heightened language of Scots to bolster the ''alienation effect'', Brecht's way of keeping an audience alert and questioning.

Arnott says: ''Brecht wanted theatre that was alive. He believed you should get to the reality of a story, and enjoy it. I hope I've used the fact of me being a playwright to dramatise what's going on, and to be as linguistically entertaining as possible.''

He adds: ''Scots language is strangely theatrical. It's a language that we all pretend to ourselves that we recognise and understand, but we really don't. That's inherently theatrical, because it means it has to be energised by the actors. There was alway s a racially-superior rhetoric about Scots being more expressive and emotional; that's basically bollocks, but what it does do is create a theatrical platform that is particularly appropriate.''

Arnott especially admires the way the politics of the play are not superficial or preachy, but fundamental to the drama's structure: ''The argument of the play is an absolutely integral part of the way it's performed, and the way the story is put together. Everyone in the play wants to get on, but because of the economic circumstances, they can't. It dramatises in a very graphic way how class, money, and employment skew and corrupt all human relationships.''

n Mr Puntila and his Man Matti, Dundee Rep, February 10 to 27; Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, March 3 to 13.