It is a curious feeling to go to meet a hated figure and find a delicate, blonde girl with a sweet face.

On Monday, 23-year-old ballerina Alina Somova opens the batting for the legendary Mariinsky Ballet’s Covent Garden tour in Romeo and Juliet, needing to defy her critics who line up from West to East accusing her of vulgarising the majestic, poised St Petersburg style that defines classical ballet worldwide.

Clowns are supposed to be chubby, grinning, funny, with anarchic hair and big red noses, like Coco. Or they are Chaplin-types, oppressed little city folk mutely combating the vast machines of the working life. They are not generally shaven-headed skinny men and women with beaky noses, starved cheekbones, and a way of life so severely monastic that it would drive you or me stark staring mad.