Shakespeare's Globe stages operatic first

The open-air Shakespeare theatre will host the premiere of The Burial At Thebes - Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney's take on Sophocles's Antigone.

The music is being written by Trinidad-born Dominique Le Gendre - the first woman to be asked to write an opera for the Royal Opera House - and the opera will be directed by West Indian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

The Burial At Thebes is being billed as an "inspired partnership" between two giants of literature and will be opening at the theatre on the South Bank on 11 October.

It is the first time Heaney has given permission for one of his works to be adapted into an opera, and the first time Walcott has directed an opera.

Walcott, who is also making his British directorial debut with the production, said: "The long friendship between myself and Seamus Heaney, and the shared vision to bring one of the world's greatest stories to a musical setting, offers a rare opportunity for a work of considerable importance and beauty." Walcott has chosen to set the story in a struggling South American republic and the ambitious project features a company of more than 30, with an orchestra - the Manning Camerata - soloists and chorus who will be mixing Heaney's writing with Trinidadian rapso - a type of calypso.

The Burial At Thebes refers to Antigone and her tragic end after choosing to defy her uncle, the Theban king Creon, and bury her brother Polynices.

When Antigone's father Oedipus was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother, he was banished from Thebes where he had been king. He was succeeded by his sons Eteocles and Polynices who ruled alternately.

However, war broke out between the brothers and they ended up killing each other.

Their successor, King Creon, declared Eteocles a hero and Polynices a traitor and said that Polynices should remain unburied.

Antigone then defied Creon and was walled up. Creon relented but it was too late as Antigone took her own life.

Heaney said his text would be given a "huge enhancement" by the talents of Le Gendre and Walcott. "Their partnership is bound to produce work where the tragic note of the original Antigone will sound more deeply and the pity and the terror strike home more immediately," Heaney said.

Le Gendre, who is applying the finishing touches to the score in Italy, said the music was well suited to the text. The composer, who is composerin-residence with Manning Camerata, said: "The text is so pressing that it has real relevance to the dilemmas we face today, to the questions of competing loyalty which recur everywhere in the story."