The National Theatre has withdrawn its Christmas production of The Count of Monte Cristo, scheduled to run between November and January, as the writer Richard Bean divulged, the script “hadn’t got the right balance for the stage” yet.

Though tickets for November to January shows have already been sold out, the London theatre claimed on its website that they had “put back” the show and would announce a replacement soon.

Richard Bean, who had earned fame writing noted productions like One Man, Two Guvnors fame, confessed to the BBC that he “just couldn’t get the script to work”.

Bean was confident that any reader of the mammoth masterpiece of 1200 pages by Alexandre Dumas would understand how difficult it was to adopt the book into an worthy production. Bean found the French classic published in 1844 to be “all plot and action” and with “very little characterization”.

“The audience has to sit and watch these people and kind of get under their skins a bit,” the writer sounded baffled. “At the moment I haven’t managed to achieve that,” he said.

In March, Bean told the BBC, he had completed the “completely different cheese” , the first act of the project. After he had handed over the first draft, “The creative team down there realised that going straight into rehearsals with a script that’s kind of not working is a bit too much of a risk for such a big show,” the writer informed.

“I don’t think it will be straight away,” said Bean. “We need a bit more time and a bit more work,” concluded Richard Bean.