First published in 1995, Hanif Kureishi’s story about an Asian student from Kent choosing between Western liberalism and Muslim fundamentalism has only grown more pertinent. The novel, though rarely as vivid, fluid or funny as his debut, The Buddha of Suburbia, is still worth reading.

But Kureishi’s stage adaptation for the National Theatre, a co-production with Tara Arts, is really pretty poor. Playing like a bullet-point breakdown of the book’s debates about identity and freedom, culture and fanaticism, The Black Album doesn’t do foreplay.

Video graphics shout out Eighties slogans such as Greed Is Good. We’re in East London, 1989: within two minutes, our hero Shahid is being offered Ecstasy by a pirouetting punk who calls him a Paki. The Satanic Verses gets its first mention within five minutes. It is to prove pivotal. Kureishi is going for something abrasive, maybe Brechtian, agitprop issues-on-the-table. Great: there is a lot to get through as Shahid flits between his stiff-backed Muslim friends and the sex, drugs and rock and roll — or at least Prince — he enjoys with Deedee, his sexy lecturer in post-colonial literature. But that calls for a script and a production much more theatrical than we get here.

What Jatinder Verma’s production gives us, alas, is overstated yet cramped naturalism. Tim Hatley’s three-walled set is decorated with video projections that make it as unevocative as Shahid’s college room, Deedee’s home and the council flat where Shahid and his Muslim brothers go to protect an Asian family from racists in Thatcher masks. It looks ugly and renders half the stage redundant.

The playing is big — in the case of Robert Mountford, as Shahid’s dissolute brother Chili, it’s almost music hall. This comes across as a default setting to get through the crammed dialogue, not as a style of its own. Kureishi is a superb writer and maybe not the best man to fillet his own book.

The Muslims haven’t got enough to offer the self-assured Shahid, so it’s not an equal fight. The characters, condensed and condensed and condensed as they are, are strictly two-dimensional. Only in a concluding set-piece, which links these events to the 7/7 bombings, does the evening take brief theatrical flight.

Elsewhere, there is too little dramatic conviction — and, when you take away Kureishi’s kinetic prose, too little story — to turn all these important ideas into anything unexpected. Jonathan Bonnici makes for a likeable lead. Tanya Franks has aplomb as the radical Deedee. But the sense of time and place that made the book compulsive has all but vanished here, never mind the electro soundtrack and the projections of Margaret Thatcher on the walls.

Box office: 020-7452 3000, to October 3. Touring from October 20

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