What do you get if you cross a Sophocles tragedy, two Nobel Laureates and a Trinidadian composer? No, not a good joke. Humour couldn’t be further from the result — The Burial at Thebes, a new operatic collaboration between Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Dominique Le Gendre, a tragedy of (unintentionally) epic proportions.

Picking up where Oedipus left off, The Burial at Thebes follows the fate of Oedipus’s incestuously conceived daughters Antigone and Ismene. Following the civil war in Thebes, King Creon decrees that their dead brother Polyneices will be left unburied as punishment for his part in the conflict. When Antigone deliberately defies his command, Creon orders her death, ignoring the pleadings of her fiancée — his own son Haemon — and the dire warnings of Tiresias, the blind sage.

Composer Dominique Le Gendre’s treatment of Heaney’s contemporary Antigone translation is the first occasion on which the poet has allowed his work to be set to music, and, judging by the awkward and amateurish result, it may well be the last.

Drawing inspiration from the rhythmic Rapso style of her homeland, Le Gendre’s music takes an aggressively syllabic approach to the task of tackling Heaney’s wordy poetry. With well over a thousand lines of text to get through, the result is a rather frenzied staccato sprechgesang, desperately cramming the elegant aural contours and cadences of Heaney’s verse into a one-size-fits-all musical packaging.

The craving for any lyrical relief from the endlessly churning verbal assault only grows as the work progresses and scene after scene of intense emotional conflict and outpouring passes by without pause. The layered riffs around which the orchestral writing is constructed fail to achieve any of the sense of doomed and inescapable inevitability that they bring to Carl Orff’s Antigone, and are merely repetitious — the persistent clatterings of a data-entry clerk doing overtime.

Vocally the cast were inadequate, not aided by the difficult acoustic of the Oxford Playhouse or the unforgiving vocal lines. Andrea Barker shone in her gloriously rich and clearly enunciated portrayal of Ismene, compensating slightly for the flat and entirely unintelligible delivery of Idit Arad as Antigone, and the strainings of Brian Green as Creon.

The reductive colonial theme of fellow Nobel poet Derek Walcott’s stage design, which placed the action in a generic developing-world dictatorship, was as lacking in nuance as the music. His simplistic direction frequently abandoned characters in frozen isolation, rooted to the spot while a token male dancer (The Spirit of the City) cavorted around them in Symbolic Fashion.

Opera at its best is more than the sum of its parts, the ultimate aesthetic union of words and music. The Burial at Thebes manages to take a glorious piece of poetry and reduce it to the prattling voiceover to a farce. How’s that for a real modern-day tragedy?