New Works by Hanef Kureishi, Alan Bennett, and Mark Ravenhill Will Play London’s National

New works by Hanef Kureishi, Alan Bennett, and Mark Ravenhill will debut later this year at London’s National Theatre.

Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Black Album, which opens in July, focuses on Shahid, an anxious young undergraduate who becomes involved in an increasingly fundamentalist Muslim activist group during the Thatcher years in London. Kureishi’s works as playwright, screenwriter, and novelist include Sleep With Me, The Buddha of Suburbia, London Kills Me, and My Beautiful Launderette.

Bennett’s still-to-be-titled new play, his first premiere since The History Boys imagines a fictional meeting between the poet WH Auden and composer Benjamin Britten, who famously fell out in the 1940s after a long friendship. The play will be directed by Nicholas Hynter, the theater’s artistic director and Bennett’s long-time collaborator.

Finally, Ravenhill will pen a new epic family adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s 2008 children’s novel Nation, to be directed by Coram Boy‘s Melly Still, and set to play during the 2009 holiday season. Set in an alternate world of the 1870s, the work centers on a South Seas boy and a “proper” English girl marooned together on an island after a devastating tsunami.

For more information, visit www.whatsonstage.com.