Being Modest Mussorgsky doesn’t look like fun, at least not as he’s portrayed in Daniel Kramer’s dramatisation of his short and troubled life. The 19th-century Russian composer was, as we know, a heavy drinker and what today’s psychoanalysts would call conflicted, and Kramer’s dance-drama tracks every twist and turn of his torment.

Named after Mussorgsky’s best known music, Pictures From An Exhibition is broadly linear, in that it starts with his childhood terrors and follows his adult unhappiness. But the mood is less biography anchored in time and place and more like a surreal, shifting nightmare. Richard Hudson’s monochromatic designs accentuate the sense of black dog.

Kramer’s experience in opera comes across in the way he uses his dancer-actors to frame and amplify the action. Excepting the clearly delineated Mussorgsky (Edward Hogg), they represent Modest’s emotions and longings, as well as his distant mother, his abusive nurse-nanny, and his deviant piano teacher. They’re also his dead friends and relations, and, as things go from grim to grisly, they morph into Russian bears, ballerinas with beak noses, and his male room-mates with baby bottles for penises. The scene where they suckle then spray him from a vodka bottle is especially bleak.

The unremitting gloom soon peaks your pity. The histrionics may reflect the composer’s life but they produce diminishing returns in the theatre.

You wonder if Kramer is being ironic. There are also chunks of his and Frauke Requardt’s choreography that look tacked on and the scene when Mussorgsky talks of art freeing Russian rings unrealistic given the small matter of serfdom was still to sort out.

It’s as if Kramer is too intrigued by Mussorgsky’s self-destructive glamour to analyse it fully. The story does have a morbid fascination, which is all the more reason for Kramer to nail the why as well as the what.

Until 23 May (0844 412 4300, www.sadlerswells.com).