WHEN last in Liverpool, actor Sean Foley was on stage wiggling his glasses and catching invisible balls in a paper bag. Foley was the Eric Morecambe half of the Morecambe and Wise act in The Play What I Wrote.

Foley wrote the play with his regular colleague Hamish McColl and after opening at the Liverpool Playhouse, the comedy went on to huge success in the West End, on tour and to Broadway.

Now Foley is returning to the Playhouse in a play what he did not write, to give it its full title, The Big Secret Live I Am Shakespeare Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show. It is more often referred to as I Am Shakespeare.

It is a first play from actor Mark Rylance, who for 10 years was in charge of London’s Globe Theatre where he did his fair share of Shakespeare.

It was while there that Rylance apparently became sceptical about Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays. Could others have written them?

The result is the comedy I Am Shakespeare, in which Foley plays faded 1980s pop star Barry Wild whose next door neighbour Frank Charlton (played by Rylance) is running a website challenging Shakespeare’s authorship.

“Barry is a free-thinking kind of person who knows nothing about Shakespeare and is therefore dumbfounded when Shakespeare suddenly turns up in Frank’s garage,” Foley explains

Shakespeare turns up in a garage? “I guess you could call it surreal when not only Shakespeare but Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford and Mary Sidney all turn up.”

The plot suggests that these claimants to Shakespeare’s works have appeared thanks to freak weather conditions and a glitch on the internet.

The debate on Shakespeare’s authorship – with audience involvement – continues on stage. “What it is an exceptionally entertaining piece of theatre that is also phenomenally educational,” says Foley.

He has never played Shakespeare because he has been tied up running his own theatre company The Right Size with colleague Hamish McColl. “I have never had the time to pull on black tights and walk around with a skull,” he says.

“But, after appearing in this play, I am sure offers will follow. I do just four lines from a Shakespeare sonnet but I handle that superbly. It will be Hamlet after this, oh yes.”

While the play takes a comic view of the who-wrote-Shakespeare debate, Rylance is taking it all rather seriously. After the show’s first run at Chichester, he and fellow actor Sir Derek Jacobi unveiled a “declaration of reasonable doubt” on the authorship question and named 20 famous doubters of the past including Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Twain and Sir John Gielgud.

Currently heading the list of those most likely to have written the plays, for those interested in such things, is Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

Foley has been in serious plays but is probably best known for the comedies he created with The Right Size.

So did he find Shakespeare’s comedies funny. “That’s a very naughty question,” he says, pausing. “Put it this way, I find this comedy funnier than Shakespeare’s comedies.”

Working on the show in rehearsal, he found the method very similar to that of the Right Size way. “We always have an initial idea and a script and work hard in rehearsal to come up with better stuff we can put in the show. That’s exactly what we did with this.

“It also changes nightly and there is a whole section which is virtually improvised in front of the audience. It is a wonderfully live event.”

The Play What I Wrote – while Foley and McColl are no longer in it – continues to tour, he says. “It is touring now or just finished,” he explains.

And he was delighted to take that comedy to Broadway where it was nominated for a Tony Award, giving Morecambe and Wise a success in the USA they never had while still alive.

Such success could attend I Am Shakespeare, with Liverpool the last date on the current tour. “There are plans to take it into London so it will be the last chance to see it before it goes to the glittering West End,” he says.

I AM Shakespeare is at the Liverpool Playhouse, October 9-13.