Rambert Dance Company’s latest addition to its 80th-anniversary repertory, Lady into Fox, premiered at Sadler’s Wells on Tuesday. It sounded in the advance publicity as if it could be a gem, but instead it was a muddle of intentions. In 1939, when the choreographer Andrée Howard created her ballet, from a David Garnett novel, to music by Honegger, the young Rambert troupe was very different in style from the one we know today, and dancers and choreographer knew how to handle a narrative.

Not so now.

Howard’s ballet was last performed in 1950; few today would remember it, or be familiar with the book. Mark Baldwin, Rambert’s artistic director, and the répétiteuse Amanda Eyles have tried to tap into a piece of company heritage by “reconstructing” the central extended duet — all that survived, on film — framing it with new dances by Baldwin as prologue and epilogue. The original music and designs have been replaced with a score by Benjamin Pope and a design by Michael Howells that juxtaposes Edwardian costumes with art deco-ish architecture and furniture. The result is incoherent, not least because the programme gives no help with the plot twists (no mention of the author) or relationships between characters — who are even deprived of their names.

If you can follow it — and guess that the tragic heroine (originally Mrs Tebrick) is a well-to-do country wife who inexplicably metamorphoses into a vixen, to the despair of her mystified husband — you would be hard pressed to engage emotionally. Neither Pieter Symonds nor Simon Cooper can sustain interest in a ballet that drags on and on.

Huntsmen and their ladies canter and swish riding crops in Baldwin’s prologue, and become party guests engaged in a fracas (why?); then the males function as hounds to destroy the fox after she has escaped into the wild. In between, there is angst in the pas de deux (Symonds dancing on pointe, a rarity for modern-day Rambert), which, however it may relate to Howard’s original, feels heavy-handed, repetitious and lacking in point amid all the rushings. The climax is poorly handled, and even Mrs T’s transformation — from gown to fox’s brush — is theatrically disappointing.

So, unfortunately, was the general tone of the programme, which opened with two pieces made for workshop seasons by company dancers. Martin Joyce dances his own Divine Influence, with Angela Towler, energetically if enigmatically, to part of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata; while Cameron McMillan’s Verge, to a score by Elspeth Brooke of sighs, squeaks, scrapes and crunches, deploys eight dancers, unattractively dressed by the designer Roland Mouret (who shouldn’t have bothered), in combative flailings around chairs. More substantial, in its handling of a cast of 19, is Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Lowry- inspired Stand and Stare (premiered in September). It makes its best effects in the massed ensembles, but the main pas de deux feels laboured, and Bhuller’s arbitrary interruptions of the Bartok music irritate.

The Dutch National Ballet, at Sadler’s Wells earlier, is an exceptionally handsome company, dancing with fine quality throughout the programme — of which two works were outstanding. Hans van Manen’s Frank Bridge Variations is beautifully shaped to Benjamin Britten’s music; while William Forsythe’s The Second Detail (to Thom Willems) builds up a fearsome momentum of massed forces, with the rigour of his characteristic deconstructed classicism.

The partnership of Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta, in the Royal Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden, was a collector’s item (and they are coming back). They share not only technical brilliance, but emotional attunement and a perfect understanding of the shaping of their roles.