Leading Comedy Theatre Director
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 achieved significant West End success in 2012, when he directed productions of The Ladykillers (for which he was nominated for the 2012 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director) and Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw. 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 will make his Royal Shakespeare Company debut, directing Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters. He has also been announced as the director of the X Factor stage musical, X Factor - It's Time To Face The Musical!, scheduled to premiere in 2014. Foley has plans for a theatrical adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, to be titled Perfect Nonsense.
Read more about this topic: Sean Foley (comedian)
Famous quotes containing the words leading, comedy, theatre and/or director:
“The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The comedy of hollow sounds derives
From truth and not from satire on our lives.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)