Barry Humphries can glean a symphony of laughter from his one-man shows as Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. Give him a symphony orchestra and a massive choir, though, and the result is a show with lavish resources yet meagre laughs.

In this ill-advised revival of a show first staged here in 1981, he dilutes the bawdy brilliance of his greatest creations by getting them to front an evening of comedy meets classical. Clearly, punters around the country whiffed compromise even before last night’s show, his first in Britain for a decade. While the Albert Hall show sold out fast, some of the regional tour dates were quietly dropped. Dame Edna on her own could pack out arenas.

Still, while he’s in warm-up mode here, Humphries can still be a master. The first half has him as the debauched diplomat Sir Les, ambling onstage, outsized manhood bulging under his formalwear. Dentures protruding, eyes searching for fun under his bouffant grey wig, he’s totally awake to the moment. Showering the front row with spittle as he pops his plosives, eyeing up the female violinist, he pays earthy tribute to “this magnificent period-style ve-nue” before launching into a latecomer.

His 15 minutes working the crowd are a thing of joy. His 30-odd minutes plying a pastiche of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Aussified into “Peter and the Shark”, are a subversion too polite to have much point to it. But worse is to come.

Swanning on in the second half as Dame Edna, firing off tip-top bad-taste topical gags about Elton John’s adoption drama, he grabs back the initiative. This is more like it. And yet some of the fight has left his eyes even before she launches into her cantata about the history of Australia.

Some under-rehearsal, as Humphries holds his script in a ringbinder, doesn’t help. Occasionally the composer and conductor Carl Davis tries to rein him in. But the scale of the orchestration only highlight the lack of a comic spark to justify it. Edna squawk-sings her way through some OK rhyming couplets that take us from creation through to Kylie — yes, there have been some updates since ’81.

But it’s not enough make up for the endurance test that this over-extended gag becomes. No wonder several people file out before the end. Humphries, at 75, is still a hell of a performer, even if he’s not a hell of a singer. But this curate’s egg of a show is not the way to relaunch his live career in Britain.

Tour continues on Friday at the Brighton Centre (0844 8471515) then Birmingham, Bournemouth, Liverpool. www.dameednatours.com

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