Preview: Tinderbox, The Bush Theatre, London

A renegade Scottish artist, on the run from the police after daubing seditious graffiti on the walls of Buckingham Palace, swims across Hadrian's Channel in late 21st-century Britain. He stows away in a dripping meat container, and is delivered into the hands of a fiercely patriotic butcher, whose shop has become the last bastion of a vanishing England. Welcome to the dystopian world of Lucy Kirkwood.

"There's definitely an absurdist edge to it," says the playwright Kirkwood, whose first work, Grady Hot Potato, prompted the Bush Theatre to offer her a commission for Tinderbox. "People have said that it's Open All Hours meets Sweeney Todd. But the world of the play comes from where I've lived. I grew up in the East End of London and then moved to Scotland for university. I came up with the idea that, in the future, Scotland would have broken away from mainland Britain, separated by a stretch of water called Hadrian's Channel. Tinderbox is about adapting to change. I love Britain's sense of the past – if I could I'd spend an awful amount of time standing in the 1940s house in the Imperial War Museum – but I also find it worrying that Britain as a nation finds it difficult to adapt and change."

A crack team has assembled to help Kirkwood spin her tale. Jamie Foreman, Bill Sykes in Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist, plays the butcher Saul; his wife ("a klepto-nympho-pyromaniac") is played by Sheridan Smith, while Bryan Dick takes the part of Perchik, the dissident outlaw destined to fall in love with the butcher's wife. Marshalling proceedings in the rehearsal room is the Bush's artistic director, Josie Rourke.

"I was a bit scared handing this mad little play to Josie," admits Kirkwood. "Luckily she has the same fascination with pork chops I do! She's got a brilliant dramaturgical sense, a sense of how a play becomes a living, breathing thing, someone who finds things you haven't seen before and has a feel for the way the muscles of the script are working."

23 April to 24 May (020-7610 4224)