Richard Bean and the mysterious case of the vanishing Count of Monte Cristo

When James Corden took to the podium to deliver his emotional acceptance speech after winning the Tony Award for his performance in One Man, Two Guvnors, one man was notably absent from the audience at New York’s Beacon Theatre.

Like the rest of us, the show’s writer, Hull-born playwright Richard Bean, heard about Corden’s success the following morning.

Since the play, adapted from the 18th-century Italian comedy Servant of Two Masters, opened at the National Theatre last year, Bean has found himself promoted to theatre’s premier league. However, the five-star reviews and unanimous praise – Radio 4 Front Row’s Mark Lawson reflected the views of many when he said it was the “single funniest production” he had ever seen – has also given him a glimpse into the behind- the-scenes machinations of the annual award bashes and Bean hasn’t liked much of what he’s seen. It happened again with the Tonys.

“I wasn’t invited,” he says, speaking from his home in London. “The thing is, in order to get an invite you have to be nominated and I wasn’t. I wrote to the Tony organisers because they wanted to enter it into the Best New Play category. I told them that was ridiculous. It’s clearly a revival, but let’s just say they didn’t respond positively and it didn’t get entered at all.

“For me One Man, Two Guvnors winning a new play award is like entering a turnip in an agricultural show and coming away with first prize for dressage. How can a root vegetable win the horse jumping?”

Bean wasn’t entirely surprised, his 2009 play England People Very Nice, widely described as a politically charged piece on immigration and multi-culturalism, albeit one with a few laughs, was nominated for Best Comedy at the following year’s Olivier Awards.

You get the impression he could rail about judging panels for days, possibly weeks, but in truth he’s recently faced a much bigger headache. Everyone has been wondering whether Bean could replicate the success of One Man, Two Guvnors and the verdict was due to be delivered this December when the National was hoping to stage his adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

The show had been plugged in the theatre’s latest programme and ticket sales had been brisk. However, last week, seemingly out of the blue, it was announced the project has been “indefinitely postponed” to give it “some more development time”.

Pulling their Christmas show could prove costly for the National, and the statement posed more questions than it gave answers.

However Bean, who had previously written a musical version of the revenge adventure, says there has been no rift, no falling out, and there was, he says, no other choice.

“What can I say? It’s been a bit of a nightmare,” he says a few hours after the National went public with the news. “If you’re going to stage these big romantic novels the audience has to be able to identify with the characters on stage. The problem is Dumas writes a lot of words, but when you break it down, he doesn’t give you very much about the four main characters Cristo is wreaking revenge on.

“The National really liked the earlier libretto I had written, but the starting point of this new adaptation had to be to take out all the music and songs. Unfortunately, that meant there wasn’t much left. It had to be built back up again and at the moment there is too much plot. All of us realised there was a problem and everyone has thankfully been very sensible and grown up about it.

“Do I regret ever having started it? Of course I do. I’m going to walk away from it for a bit and hopefully inspiration will strike.”

The shelving of The Count of Monte Cristo is something of a blip for the National, which has been enjoying a purple period under director Sir Nicholas Hytner thanks to One Man, Two Guvnors and the theatre’s other international hit, War Horse.

At a time of Arts Council cuts there’s even more pressure on theatres to justify their subsidies, but as Bean, who was back in Yorkshire last week to host an event at York’s Festival of Ideas, says, you can’t manufacture box office success. “With both those plays the National took a big risk. A story about the Second World War with a puppet as a horse doesn’t sound like a winner and neither did One Man, Two Guvnors. It’s a farce and people had stopped staging farces because they were seen as dated and they no longer made financial sense.

“No-one could have looked at either of those two proposals and thought they made commercial sense. I do a lot of talks at writers’ groups and the one question aspiring playwrights always ask is: ‘I’d love to be a writer, but how do you make money out of it?’

“My response is always the same: ‘Concentrate on getting the art right and the money will take care of itself’.”

Bean speaks from more than a decade’s worth of experience. A latecomer to the stage, he worked as an occupational psychologist for 15 years before trying stand-up in and around Hull and writing sketches for what he describes as those “terrible unfunny shows at 6.30pm on Radio 4.” After a few forays into playwrighting, he hit his stride in 1999 when Toast, about a Hull bread factory and the eccentrics who worked there, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and he’s produced more than a play a year ever since.

In 2000 it was Mr England, which opened with a middle manager having mysteriously defecated in his own living room. Two years later it was The God Botherers and the misplaced efforts of a group of foreign aid workers and in 2005 it was Harvest, which Bean describes as his “pig farming play”.

By the time England People Very Nice premiered at the National Theatre, Bean had more than fulfilled his rising star potential.

However, even for a trusted playwright, the success of One Man, Two Guvnors has been something else altogether.

“When you write a play all you really dream about is getting past the previews without being too embarrassed. The idea of transferring to Broadway isn’t even on your radar.

“Having said that, we knew One Man, Two Guvnors was going to be a little bit special when Hytner invited 100 schoolchildren to the theatre to watch it in rehearsals. The cast weren’t even in costume, but after the first five minutes when James Corden went over backwards to catch a peanut you could tell they loved it.

“It isn’t like the theatre I got taken to at school which was supposed to educate or make us better people. One Man, Two Guvnors feels like watching grown-ups behaving like four-year-olds and a little part of all of us would like to be that silly.”

When the show transferred to Broadway, a number of British critics were sniffy about the changes made to appeal to US audiences. Bean name checks one of them, David Lister, who vented his annoyance in The Independent, claiming the removal of cricket references and the Americanisation of some words and phrases was both unnecessary and patronising.

“I don’t get it. Comedy is like a machine and the punchline is a vital cog. If you got a joke about a Swiss roll and no-one in America knows what one is, you’d be mad not to change it,” says Bean, who swapped it for a chicken Kiev. “You can’t ask actors to spend six months saying the same line to complete silence. I don’t want calls at 3am from actors telling me my play isn’t working. Besides, they’d only go and change it anyway.”

While The Count of Monte Cristo is on hold and One Man, Two Guvnors is taking care of itself, Bean has much else to keep him busy. He has written a musical version of Nigel Cole’s feelgood film Made in Dagenham, which will star Bond Girl Gemma Arterton and he’s involved with a motion caption version of The Threepenny Opera with Andy Serkis.

He’s not sure what he’ll do next, but he does know it won’t be television.

“A lot of it is about self-esteem – I get the impression TV doesn’t respect writers very much,” he says. “I’ve got a daughter, so it’s on all the time, but I don’t really like it, pretty much everything you see revolves around two unpleasant people shouting at each other.

“The only thing I like is Police, Camera, Action. Watching people nick Range Rovers is something of a guilty pleasure, but generally when I find myself in front of the TV, I always think there are a million better things I could be doing.”

One of those things is watching live stand-up and he still has a hankering to return to the circuit where he first cut his teeth.

“I was pretty awful. I basically did 20-minute slots with only 10 minutes worth of material. I’d go back if I knew I had an hour’s worth of one liners and it’s something always there in the back of mind.”

On the back of the success of One Man, Two Guvnors, Bean has the world at his feet, but if the last few years have taught him anything it is that in showbiz there’s no room for complacency.

“People who tell you they don’t care about awards tend to already have lots of them,” he says, returning to one of his favourite subjects. “The only thing I’ve ever won was the George Devine Award for England People Very Nice. I was out in the garden when I got the call and the woman on the other end told me I couldn’t tell anyone else for three months.

“I put the phone down and just let out a big ‘Yes’. The old guy next door stopped trimming the hedge, turned to me and said: ‘Good news?’ I broke my promise immediately and you know what he said: ‘Oh I won that too once’. Turned out it was back in the 1970s, he only ever wrote one play so it didn’t do much for his career. Somewhere in there is a cautionary tale for all of us.”

Richard Bean: A Life on stage

Richard Bean was born in Hull in 1956 and studied social psychology at Loughborough University of Science and Technology.

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean began doing stand-up comedy and went onto become one of the writers on Radio 4’s Control Group Six, which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.

In the last 13 years, he was written 16 plays, mixing new writing with adaptations.

Servant of Two Masters was written in 1743 by Carlo Goldoni and Bean moved the action to Brighton in 1963.

Following its premiere in June last year, One Man, Two Guvnors transferred to Broadway in April and the play went on to receive seven Tony Award nominations.