Perhaps you are feeling masochistic and want to see a great story and terrific libretto clobbered to death by dreadful music and dreary direction. If so, catch this woeful new opera as it makes its way to Liverpool and Oxford this weekend.

Sophocles, who concocted the original tragedy of Antigone and her doomed attempt to give her disgraced brother a decent burial, will be gnashing whatever 2,400-year-old teeth he has left at the ineptitude of it all. And I imagine that Seamus Heaney, whose 2004 adaptation was used as the libretto, will be wondering why on earth he agreed that his masterly poetry could be set to music, at least by the Trinidad-born composer Dominique Le Gendre. Indeed, the opera’s only good bits were the lines left as speech.

To say that Le Gendre’s music is as dull as ditchwater is a monstrous slur on stagnant puddles. In two hours of kindergarten orchestration and meaningless doodles, obliterating Heaney’s wry metaphors like sludge oozing over a mosaic, I heard not a single bar that imprinted itself on my memory or stirred my emotions. Add to that a staging, by the poet Derek Walcott, that was as inspired as a bus queue, and you have the makings of a thespian fiasco.

To judge from the costumes, Walcott had decided to set the story in some modern-day South American police state, albeit one with an Ancient Greek dancer flitting around. But the performers might as well have been in the Milky Way for all the context they conveyed.

Two non-singers, John Joyce and John Van der Put, could at least inject a little sense and sensibility into their lines. And I felt sorry for Andrea Baker, playing Antigone’s sister Ismene, Andy Morton as Creon’s rebellious son Haemon, and Martin Nelson as the soothsayer Tiresias: decent singers, who put across their words with clarity and fervour. But one or two of the other soloists had no place on a professional opera stage.

The real tragedy here was not Antigone’s, but the squandered opportunity. Despite the persistent drone of a helicopter, the open-air Globe revealed itself to be an interesting home for a purpose-written opera, with the musicians of the Manning Camerata (which commissioned the work) in the gallery, the conductor (Peter Manning) down below, and the stage canopy an ideal natural projector for voices.

What’s more, the enterprise pulled a huge crowd (partly attracted, no doubt, by the names of Heaney and Walcott, both Nobel Laureates).

What a disaster if some of them went away thinking that all modern operas are as dire as this.

Friday: Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool; Sunday: Oxford Playhouse.

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