Nobel literary laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott are collaborating on a new opera due to be unveiled this fall at the Globe Theatre in London.

The piece, according to the Guardian newspaper, is based on Heaney’s acclaimed play The Burial at Thebes and will be set in a South American republic.

The 2004 work retells the original ancient play by Sophocles, which examines Antigone’s punishment, to be walled up in a cave, for defying the king of Thebes. Antigone chooses to take her own life rather than submit.

The Irish poet said he’s hoping to get a “huge enhancement” of his work from Walcott, who will direct the production with the Trinidadian composer Dominique Le Gendre providing the compositions.

“Heaney’s text is so pressing and so contemporary that it has real relevance to the dilemmas we face today, to questions of competing loyalty which recur everywhere in this story,” Le Gendre told the newspaper.

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