Barry Humphries announces farewell UK tour

Barry Humphries is to make a farewell tour of the UK next year.

The Australian comedian announced his retirement earlier this, and now his creations Les Patterson, grandfatherly Sandy Stone and Dame Edna Everage will appear on the British stage for the last time.

Announcing Edna’s last tour of his native Australia earlier this year, 78-year-old Humphries said: ‘Edna will crop up on television I guess, but not in a live show. The fact of the matter is that I'm beginning to feel a bit senior.

‘It's the best aerobics you could do, leaping around on stage, but it's gruelling when there are other things to do.’

Eat Pray Laugh! will open at the Milton Keynes Theatre in October and play the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, before transferring to an as-yet unnamed London theatre for a West End season over Christmas 2013.

The production – directed by Simon Phillips, who directed the original Priscilla Queen of the Desert show – promises ‘spectacular sets and dancers’ as Dame Edna ‘meditates on the big issues of gender, ethnicity and climate change’.

Humphries created Dame Edna back in 1955 when he was touring country towns in Australia, and she made her first appearance in a Melbourne University revue that year.

Click here for the dates of Eat, Pray, Laugh, announced so far.

Published: 10 Dec 2012