Oh dear, I feel as if I’ve just emerged from a bad Eighties underwear party. I was so sure I’d disagree with the critics who slated Matthew Bourne’s dance drama of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel. Bourne has done more than anyone to demystify ballet for a new audience with his all-male Swan Lake, The Car Man and Play Without Words at the National Theatre (based on the Joseph Losey film The Servant). His visual imagination is breathtaking. But he’s clearly not a text boy.

It’s all very well transposing Wilde’s morality tale to the modern, cut-throat fashion world. But the original metaphor — of a portrait in the attic that ages and decays in your place — is still so powerful, you wonder why Bourne junked it. And there really is no sense of moral descent to the piece (so powerful in the book). Richard Winsor’s Dorian (a waiter turned model) looks gorgeous, but he is never remotely innocent. “He was a tart from the start,” the architect next to me observed acerbically.

I’ll leave it to the dance critics to mention the self-conscious posturing and the grindingly bad score. For me the disappointment is literary. As a book, The Portrait of Dorian Gray is still so dark and feverish and extraordinary, it cries out for a great adaptation. Tableaux of pretty people indulging in group sex on stage just aren’t good enough.

Yes, of course there is a powerful gay undercurrent to Wilde’s writing — but he never actually spells out the form Dorian’s corruption takes. It’s all in the head, which is far more unsettling. Aesthetics — the obsessive pursuit of beauty — for Wilde isn’t just about boys in Y-fronts.

And there is real suffering in the original. Basil the painter adores Dorian from afar, even as he sees him plunge into hell. In Bourne’s updating he becomes a fashion photographer who shags everything that moves — and wouldn’t know the meaning of unrequited love. The only interesting twist is making hedonist Lord Henry a woman. Michela Meazza, in Anna Wintour suit and bob, is truly magnetic.

You could blame the short rehearsal time (Bourne had five weeks to get it ready for the Edinburgh Festival where it premiered). But his overheated erotic imagination (usually a very interesting place to be) also lets him down. If you want real, intelligent sensuality, try the Ballet Boyz or Michael Clark or Sylvia Guillem. Nudity is not the same thing as sex.

Better still, go back to Wilde’s original. It will terrify and enthrall you all over again.

Until 14 September. Sadler’s Wells, EC1 (0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com).