Even before the verdict was in, Matthew Bourne's latest production could be judged a success. On the opening night of its official world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Dorian Gray had been declared the biggest- selling dance show in the festival's 60-year history. The production, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel, is noteworthy in another respect, too. It takes Bourne, the master of wry and nostalgic humour, into much darker waters. He's trying something different, a contemporary social commentary that's part morality tale and part horror story. So more's the pity that he can't make it work.

Bourne has “freely” reimagined Wilde's Gothic masterpiece to serve as a satire of modern celebrity gone horribly awry. Here Dorian is a waiter on the make who becomes the poster boy for a new men's fragrance, the aptly named Immortal. With his beauty thus immortalised on advertising billboards (the portrait in the attic) and his career manipulated by a high-powered fashion editor and her snap-happy photographer, Dorian's fame is assured. But, like so many real-life celebrities who inhabit the tabloids, this bisexual stud is on a one-way street to debauchery and drug-fuelled excess. And it doesn't end there. Once he kills Basil, the photographer who made his image (beating him with a camera), Dorian embarks on a murderous rampage as if suddenly releasing his inner Dexter. As the body count rises (corpses are nailed to his wall like grotesque works of art), Dorian becomes less a victim of fame and more a nasty serial killer.

Somewhere in there is an attack on the preening narcissism of celebrity culture, but it's defeated by the utter shallowness of its realisation. Bourne's imagination has hardly been taxed by the erotic tousling, endless miming and self-conscious posturing that here passes for choreography. The repetitive succession of gay duets, straight couplings and group gropes is tiresome and unconvincing. The pas de trois with Dorian, Basil and his camera does have its moments, but their stylised man-on-man action goes on so long that it begins to feel like a bad porn flick.

That's an impression heightened by Terry Davies's soul-destroying score, a vacuous composition that veers between bad porn and bad sci-fi. Lez Brotherston designs a clever revolving set that takes us from bedroom to bathroom, from gallery to photographer's studio, from opera house to posh party. His costumes - white for Dorian and his evil Doppelgänger (a living manifestation of the famous portrait?), black for everyone else - favour men in tight underwear. As Dorian, Richard Winsor has to hold the whole together, which he does admirably, despite having so little to work with. But what a wasted opportunity.

Box office: 0131-473 2000, to Aug 30