The sight of the great St Petersburg Maryinsky Ballet in its new production of The Golden Age is one that doesn’t bear repeating. It’s dispiriting enough the first time around. Shostakovich’s score may not be the danciest in the 20th-century canon, but it is filled with the joie de vivre of melody and the hot blood of melodrama. This dismal and dreary new staging of The Golden Age has neither.

Perhaps this project was doomed from the start. Valery Gergiev, the Maryinsky’s supremo, wanted a production of Shostakovich’s 1930 football ballet to bring to London for his Shostakovich on Stage season at the Coliseum. A Russian choreographer, Igor Markov, was duly hired and subsequently fired. Enter the American Noah Gelber, one of William Forsythe’s favourite dancers in Frankfurt, who had worked with the Maryinsky before (he staged The Overcoat).

Gelber’s three-act production reconceives the story as a tale of young lovers from either side of the Iron Curtain who are reunited 70 years after parting. They first meet at a Western European sporting competition in 1930 where Alexander is a star Soviet football player and Sophie is a young gymnast, daughter of the local mayor. The lovers are played by two sets of dancers, young ones who do the dancing and old ones who frame the action. Sophie and Alexander fall in love only to be separated until meeting up by accident in an urban park somewhere in Western Europe in 2000. It’s all too much for the elderly Sophie who, overcome by memory, lies in a hospital bed reliving her golden age with Alexander. Act III retraces their fortunes during the Second World War (why?) before reuniting them.

For the most part Gelber’s inept staging doesn’t bother with choreography, directing the action as if it were a play or an opera. Neither is his movement strategy clear; at times it borders on the inert and when they do come, the classical steps look like classroom exercises. His emotionally barren language — isn’t this supposed to be a love story? — achieves the almost impossible task of making the artists of the Maryinsky look like bad dancers.

And Gelber certainly doesn’t know how to handle the big ensemble, who stand around as if waiting for the dance to remember them.

The production’s look (sets by Zinovy Margolin) is stripped to essentials with a heavy reliance on film to provide scenic description. Tatiana Noginova’s period costumes are vibrant, but there are far too many characters wearing them.

For the dancers, nothing but pity — for a production that doesn’t deserve them — and gratitude for all they did to make it watchable. As the old lovers, Gabriella Komleva and Sergey Berezhnoy were the most believable people on stage; as the young lovers, Daria Pavlenko and Mikhail Lobukhin did their best in a choreographic vacuum. Tugan Sokhiev conducted Shostakovich with unbelievable vigour. But what a sorry sight it all was.