Monty Python’s The Life of Brian refuses to draw its terminal breath.

Eric Idle, one of the five surviving Pythons, has announced plans to adapt the film for the stage as a “comic oratorio” with a premiere in Toronto in June.

Provisionally titled Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy), in a nod both to Handel and one of the film’s best-known lines, the project will be Idle’s second Python musical.

Monty Python’s Spamalot, which lovingly ripped off the troupe’s first film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was a Tony-award winning hit on Broadway and is now selling out in the West End where it has been nominated for seven Olivier awards this weekend.

How the other Pythons feel about Idle continuing to plunder their legacy is unclear. Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and John Cleese had little involvement with Spamalot and were originally reluctant to give their approval. However, they were won round by a new song — an Andrew Lloyd Webber pastiche called The Song That Goes Like This — and subsequently soothed by a stream of royalties.

Spamalot has become a box-office phenomenon, taking more than $100 million (£51 million) in New York alone since there in March 2005. Next month it will also open at the purpose-built Grail theatre in Las Vegas.

Idle takes the majority of the profits, but the remainder is divided among the remaining members and the estate of Graham Chapman, who died of cancer in 1989.

The original Life of Brian was condemned as blasphemous on its release in 1979, prompting some local councils to ban it. Chapman played Brian Cohen, a young man born in a stable next to Jesus Christ who then lives in obscurity for 33 years before being mistaken for the Messiah and eventually crucified.

The Pythons have always maintained that it was a satire on organised religion, rather than a direct attack on Christianity.

However, EMI, the film’s financiers, pulled out at the last minute because of the controversial nature of the material and filming only went ahead with the aid of the late George Harrison, who set up Handmade Films to support the project.

The resulting film contained several scenes that have made an indelible impact on popular culture — from Cleese’s Jewish rebel leader asking “What have the Romans ever done for us?” to Brian’s mother telling his assembled disciples: “He’s not the Messiah — he’s a very naughty boy.”

In 2006 it was named the greatest comedy film of all time in a poll for Channel 4.

The new show has been commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as part of the city’s inaugural Luminato Festival of the Arts.

Peter Oundjian, the orchestra’s music director, is Idle’s cousin. But the comedian insisted that nepotism had nothing to do with the decision.

“Who would want to work with their relatives, anyway?” he asked. “They’re usually unpleasant, dishonest and slow to pick up the cheque.”

The details of the project remain vague. Idle said simply: “I promise it will be funnier than Handel, although probably not as good.”

Handel’s Messiah, one of his most famous works, was first performed in 1742 and took much of its text from the Bible.

Idle and John Du Prez, his Spamalot co-composer, will collaborate again on Not the Messiah. The pair first worked together on the original Life of Brian.

It is not clear whether the new work will include the song Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life from the original film, in which it was memorably sung by Idle on the cross. Idle and Du Prez have already worked it into Spamalot but may feel that Not the Messiahis incomplete without it.

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