Career
Following early success as part of the comedy double act The Right Size, and their long-running stage show The Play What I Wrote, Foley has more recently become a director of successful West End comedy productions. Foley and Hamish McColl formed The Right Size in 1988. They devised and performed in the shows, with regular creative team collaborators such as director Jozef Houben, designer Alice Power, and songwriter Chris Larner.
Their style combined elements of clowning, physical comedy, mime, slapstick, vaudeville and variety.
The Right Size"s major successes were Do You Come Here Often?, about two strangers stuck in a bathroom for 25 years, and The Play What I Wrote, a tribute to Morecambe and Wise. The Right Size were active until 2006.
Foley has played some major parts in traditional scripted roles, including Freud in Hysteria by Terry Johnson at Birmingham Representative in 2007, and the single role in the film of Samuel Beckett"s Acting Without Words I directed by Karel Reisz. He appeared alongside Mark Rylance in I Am Shakespeare at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester in 2007.
Foley made his directorial debut in 2007 with Pinter"s People.
He then directed several stage shows by stand-up comedians including Joan Rivers, Nina Conti and Armstrong and Miller. He also, with Patrick Barlow, co-directed and co-wrote a four-actor stage adaptation of Ben Hur at the Watermill Theatre, a regional English theatre. In 2013, Foley made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut, directing Thomas Middleton"s A Mad World, My Masters.
The production was well received by United Kingdom critics, notably by Patrick Marmion in the Daily Mail who gave the show five stars, and in the Financial Times, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
lieutenant was announced in June 2013 that Foley would be directing Matthew MacFadyen and Stephen Mangan in a theatrical adaptation of Philisophy G. Wodehouse"s Jeeves and Wooster stories, to be titled Perfect Nonsense, at the Duke of York"s Theatre, London, from 30 October 2013. Foley also directed the X Factor stage musical, I Can"t Sing! The X Factor Musical, which premiered in 2014.
Olivier Tony Television Radio The Remains of Foley and McColl Foley and McColl Again The Goldfish Bowl.