It is almost too good to be true. After years of returning from the Edinburgh Fringe with little more than buttock cramp, having had nothing but the odd Belgian who sang Jacques Brel songs to get excited about, that most derided of species, the theatre critic, is today savouring a rare moment of triumph.

For after a decade when the biggest arts festival in the world was fast turning into a theatrical desert, they at last have a discovery worth shouting about.

The fact that Gregory Burke, a 32-year-old university drop-out and dishwasher from Dunfermline, is the sensation of the festival, even before it officially starts tomorrow, is remarkable enough.

But Burke, much to his own bemusement, is already being compared to Behan and Beckett.

What is more, the National Theatre, criticised for its caution and conservatism under Trevor Nunn, was so "blown away" by his play Gagarin Way that it snapped it up for a transfer to London even before the first preview.

It is a riotous satire about a factory manager who is taken hostage by three of his own workers after a botched heist

Not only is it the first thing Burke has ever written, but he had given up all hope of being a writer at all after sending the script to Edinburgh's Traverse theatre.

Set in a street named after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Lumphinnans, the small Fife town that returned one of Britain's few communist MPs in the 1930s, Gagarin Way has the cheek to analyse the political philosophies of the 20th century in the scatological Scots of Irvine Welsh, and with a plot that is worthy of Quentin Tarantino. More bizarrely still, it opens with a 10 minute joke about the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

"I didn't know enough to know that it wasn't supposed to be a good idea to do things like that," Burke said. "I just thought, let's have some fun with Sartre."

"I didn't hear anything for seven months after sending the play to the Traverse so I thought that was that, I'm not going to bother trying anything else," Burke said yesterday.

"I ditched the job washing dishes in a hotel, which I was doing to give myself time to write, and I had just started back in a proper job in a factory when the call came through from the Traverse."

Last night, as the Glasgow Herald declared that Gagarin Way was "pretty close to genius ... It can't be stated how brilliant this is", it seemed as if Burke's dishwashing days were over for good. The Guardian's critic Lyn Gardner was equally uncompromising in her praise, calling the play "brilliant" and adding: "Burke's bitterly funny drama is a ton of theatrical dynamite cunningly disguised as a mere Molotov cocktail. It slips down easily and then explodes."

Even Joyce McMillan, the notoriously exacting critic of the Scotsman, was full of praise - her only dilemma was whether to give the play the full five stars of total approval.

Only Burke, it seems, has yet to be entirely convinced of his own genius.

"It's feels very weird and strange, all these five star reviews and all the attention. Today has been very unsettling. You think, 'Oh dear, what have I done.' I know it's all downhill from here - that's my motto, in fact."

He added: "My family are a bit incredulous too. They came to see it last night and really loved it but I know at some level there were thinking, 'You mean, you wrote that. You?'

"I dropped out of university and did all these rubbish jobs and I suppose they thought, 'Oh well, it could be worse - at least he's not a mass murderer.'"

Burke, who spent a large part of his childhood in Gibraltar, has since written a play for BBC Radio 3 called Occyeyes, set on the rock during the Falklands war.

"If my next play doesn't go on at the National, everyone will say I've failed. You have to keep going up in exponential leaps. But I don't care. You get rejection - so what?

"I wouldn't even bother if I had to go back to the factory. I'll probably end up sleeping under a bridge or drinking meths in a park."