A “nightmarish comedy” about Donald Trump, with characters including the US president, former FBI director James Comey and George W Bush, will have its world premiere at the Almeida theatre in London next year. Shipwreck is written by the US playwright Anne Washburn, who is best known for Mr Burns, a postapocalyptic epic that revolves around an episode of The Simpsons, and for an adaptation of The Twilight Zone.

The Almeida’s artistic director, Rupert Goold, who will direct Shipwreck, says that “Trump, his family and his immediate inner circle [will be] either on stage or talked about almost incessantly” in the play. Alongside them are fictional liberal characters who are “wrestling with what Trump is, both politically and existentially”. Washburn, said Goold, also wants to understand people who voted for Trump and to give them a voice.

Washburn was partly inspired to write the play by a 2017 production of Julius Caesar at New York’s Public Theater that prompted rightwing protests over its Trump-like Caesar. Goold says Washburn became interested in “the difficulty of pinning down the contemporary political moment” and how playwrights could respond to Trump “when he changes every day in terms of controversy”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The New York Public Theater production of Julius Caesar was a start-point for Anne Washburn. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP

The director thinks that while the unsettling, Kubrick-like comedy is steeped in US current affairs, it also chimes with a global political climate and will resonate for British audiences when it opens next February, one month before Britain is due to leave the European Union. He says Shipwreck asks: “How did we get here, careering backwards and forwards, no hand on the tiller? Is there an evil masterplan, or just total anarchy ahead? It’s very like our own Brexit experiences.”

Last year, the documentary maker and activist Michael Moore took down Trump in the Broadway theatre show The Terms of My Surrender. Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner has said he is writing a play about Trump set two years before the 2016 election, exploring “how a country commits political suicide”.

Alongside Shipwreck, the Almeida’s new season will include Simon Russell Beale as Richard II, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins; a new version of Maxim Gorky’s Vassa, adapted by Mike Bartlett and directed by Tinuke Craig; David Farr’s adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg’s film The Hunt and Cordelia Lynn’s new version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by Rebecca Frecknall and starring Patsy Ferran. Frecknall and Ferran collaborated on an acclaimed version of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the Almeida earlier this year. That production will transfer to the West End in November.