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But Zenaida Yanowsky is at the forefront of the company’s current surge of dramatic brilliance and though her first appearance as a shy convent-bound girl is a series of balletic conventions, she quickly stamps her own authority on the proceedings.

And while Yanowsky slowly works her way under Manon’s skin, her guest artist partner, Danish-born Kenneth Greve as idealistic hero, Des Grieux, just looks worried to death. Tall, muscular and masculine, Greve has a steady strength and in the first bedroom love duet they look beautiful together. The fact that Greve cannot yet make technical sense of the choreography really doesn’t matter, his earnest yet clumsy St Bernard puppy charm is a welcome reality check after the clinical physical perfection we now accept as the norm from RB male principals.

Manon’s central enigma is why does this fresh young woman ditch her young true love for the highest bidder? Yanowsky’s answer is straight from the pages of French demi-monde novelist Collette, diamonds are a girl’s best friend. Yanowsky has the room at her fingertips when she enters the Act II gambling den, looking as regal as a young Queen Mary on the arm of her “protector,” William Tuckett’s fearsome Monsieur G.M. But with her sugar daddy dominating the tables beside her, Yanowsky looks at the ardent lover prostrate at her jewelled feet and as if written in neon above her head, thinks, I must be mad but I can’t resist him. It is all downhill from there, she is arrested as a prostitute and the couple are transported to a penal colony in Louisiana where she dies.

MacMillan’s Manon is a modern masterpiece with some of the most perfectly constructed dance sequences in the contemporary ballet opus. Zenaida Yanowsky has earned her place at its heart.