What a huge debt the world of the arts owes to Oxford’s Pegasus Theatre for nurturing the talents of some of the stage stars of our age. Last Friday morning, members of Complicite, in the city with their children’s show Lionboy at Oxford Playhouse, returned to their beginnings in a visit to the Magdalen Road theatre where their ascent to worldwide fame began in the 1980s.

Director Annabel Arden and company members took part in a question and answer session with youth theatre members and posed for photographs in their old rehearsal space, which can still be located within the massively transformed building.

Even as they did so, I was penning my laudatory review (Weekend, Page 8) of a hilarious new show at Stratford which has been masterminded by Sean Foley, who also had a Pegasus Theatre background. This represents his debut with the RSC, in charge of a production that clearly ‘has legs’.

Its airing comes at a high-profile time for Sean, whose stage successes include the Morecambe and Wise tribute of The Play What I Wrote, which began life as a Pegasus commission.

His production (writer Graham Linehan) of the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers is soon to return to the West End. In the autumn he will be directing Perfect Nonsense, Robert and David Goodale’s play based on P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, starring Matthew McFadyen and Stephen Mangan as Jeeves and Bertie, and also destined for the West End. Next year he is taking charge of Harry Hill’s new musical I Can’t Sing! This is based on The X Factor, which Gray Matter readers might need to be told is a successful television talent contest.

All very impressive — and exciting for those who knew of Sean and his work before he made it big. He was a member of The Right Size, which seized the baton from Complicite at the Pegasus with series of zany shows there.

The first of these, called Que Sera, was conceived with the help of Complicite performer and director Marcello Magni. Southern Arts, it should be noted, did its bit to support the group. As we reported: “Having watched Théâtre de Complicité [as the company was then called] blossom into an internationally acclaimed company from Magdalen Road, Oxford, they clearly think The Right Size could follow suit.”

The report continued: “Que Sera is a wacky celebration of Fifties dance, music and dress sense.” This is interesting, because the same could be said of Sean’s reworking for the RSC (with Phil Porter) of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters.

To judge from the one review of Que Sera (May 1988) we have in the Newspaper House files, the show was not a conspicuous success. The Oxford Mail’s Don Chapman wrote: “John [as he then was] Foley satirises the idioms of the macho-male of the rock era amusingly . . . but the action and the dialogue is [sic] too long-winded and inconsequential.”

He hailed The Bath, a year later, as “a much more inspired piece of lunacy”, and by the time of The Moose, in December 1991, I was really able to reach for the superlatives in my review.

“The Right Size,” I wrote, “transports the audience to the Frozen North, shivering and shaking with laughter, in its latest romp. Inspired, it would seem, by Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, this gloriously funny 90-minute show offers some familiar comic capers from gold prospecting life, blended with slapstick drolleries of the company’s own devising.”

It was not until 1997, however, that he and Right Size colleague Hamish McColl achieved nationwide fame with their smash hit Do You Come Here Often?, about two men stuck in a bathroom for 25 years.

This enjoyed a sell-out seven-week season at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End and went on to win the duo the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment.