There is no rule-book for composing an opera, but if there was, Rule One might be: “Do not collaborate with Nobel Prize-winning poets.” For her new opera, The Burial at Thebes, Dominique Le Gendre worked with not one, but two: Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. To judge from the London premiere, the composer was the poor relation; the programme even put Heaney’s name before Le Gendre’s, surely the wrong way round for an opera.

Heaney’s play, a version of Sophocles’s Antigone, was written for speaking voices. Would Heaney have allowed the drastic surgery that would have made it fit for singers? It’s not clear but Le Gendre made only minor adjustments, and she and her singers were hobbled by the results. With too many words, Le Gendre’ s music had little scope for expression, too often descending into featureless anonymity.

Her 13-piece orchestra, Manning Camerata conducted by Peter Manning, was heavy on wind instruments. From its position above the stage it sounded attractively like a street band, with busy percussion providing rhythmic underpinning that sometimes took the music close to rap.

Perhaps that was the way to go, because operatic singing failed to deliver, and only Martin Nelson (Tiresias) and Andy Morton (Haemon) made the words count. A few spoken passages provided relief from the enveloping verbal fog; otherwise the audience had to follow the text in the programme.

“Director and designer” Derek Walcott set the action in a contemporary state ruled over by a black tyrant, a hardly radical premise. Unfortunately his rudimentary direction left the cast to mill aimlessly, with only the most conventional stagecraft to support them, while a silent dancer cavorted at regular intervals like a refugee from some village hall production. Nobel Prizes, it seems, do not an opera make.