WHAT were the Bolshoi Ballet management thinking last year when they let Declan Donnellan loose on Romeo and Juliet? The London-based theatre director has taken one of Russia’s favourite ballets and turned it on its head, throwing tradition to the wind and stripping it of everything — classical virtuosity, lyrical pas de deux, even pointe shoes — that the dancers are used to. If Bolshoi bosses wanted to signal a willingness to take creative risks, this is it. But if they wanted a good ballet, well, there is no part of this wilfully perverse two-act rewrite that fits the bill.

The theatre crowd was out in force on Monday to see the production’s first showing outside Russia. Among the luminaries I spotted were Stephen Daldry, Simon Russell Beale, Joseph Fiennes and David Lan. Perhaps in Donnellan’s world the fact that the production is theatrically arresting is enough. For ballet lovers, the abysmal choreography will cast a pall over everything.

What has Donnellan done? He’s produced a piece of expressionist physical theatre contained within the starkly geometrical confines of Nicholas Ormerod’s building-block set. Donnellan has abbreviated the story (and the score), stripped it of minor characters, filtered it through a modern-dress sensibility and mined it for subtext, most notably in the case of Mercutio, whose flirtatious antics in drag enrage the macho Tybalt.

But the director’s most important decision is to cast the corps de ballet as a meddling Greek chorus of Capulets and Montagues who manipulate the lovers and hover maliciously over the action like vultures. Throughout there’s an overpowering sense that Romeo and Juliet are mere players in a larger canvas; keeping them apart (especially in the balcony scene) is more important to Donnellan than bringing them together. It’s left to the choreographer, the Moldovan Radu Poklitaru, to add love to the equation, and this he signally fails to do.

Poklitaru’s cartoony style, a watered-down cross between Mats Ek and Angelin Preljocaj, is banal and meaningless, tacky and irritating, gawky and naive, and apparently suffering from a disorder of the central nervous system. The corps de ballet clump about like crabs with an itchy crotch; the lovers’ bedroom duet is a disaster of foot fondling and sheet hugging. The dancers battle heroically through the indignity of Poklitaru’s ineptitude, especially Maria Alexandrova, whose self-assertive, trouser-wearing Juliet manages to rise above the mess to find an ounce of human warmth in a cold production. Praise, too, to Denis Savin’s Romeo, a sweet young man forced into the gauchest choreography. The terrific sound from the pit is at odds with the action on stage, which seems to disregard every musical cue Prokofiev gave. Brave new world for the Bolshoi? More like a dead duck — and a missed opportunity.