PEOPLE used to run away with the circus. Not so easy now when it’s in a city-centre theatre for a couple of days, instead of on the coast or on the outskirts for a season.

Some things don’t change, however. Elephants and lions may have gone, but clowns remain, central to Russian circus in particular, and as tiresome, attention-seeking and unfunny as ever.

Shakespeare made his clowns/fools the sharpest pencils in the classroom; by contrast, Russian circus clowns are physical loons, their comedy as slow as a tractor on the A59.

In circus convention, Moscow State Circus entrusts the story of Babushkin Sekret, the legend of The Twelve Chairs, to their clowns cum roaming detectives, Splendid Pavlik (his own sobriquet, not your reviewer’s description) and Klava, a former female boxer who has swapped knockouts for the knockabout. It is to be hoped she had more punch in her pugilist career.

Thankfully, these clowns regularly have to make way for a host of speciality acts, the chair story largely taking a back seat in favour of the wow factor provided initially by aerial contortionist Katiya Drozdova, so dazzling beneath a chandelier.

Take your pick of favourites; maybe the intricate skipping of Rubtsovs’ Skakalki 9; the roller-skating-on-a-table twists and turns of the Deslavskiys; and the unbelievably quick costume changes of Duo Shmandrovskiys that could consign excuses for being late for a party to the bin.

Or how about the rapid-fire juggling of the Yakovslevs, suspended up poles, and sometimes throwing over a shoulder, backwards? Or the graceful aerial sail act of acrobat and former ballerina Nataliya, in film star white and dark glasses?

Hitting the heights too were strong-man Sasha Doktorov, climbing his ever-increasing stack of chairs to find the story’s 12th and last chair, and the flying, somersaulting acrobatics of the gymnastic Rubtsovs Jesters.

Clowns may induce frowns but the other traditional skills of the Moscow State Circus still have their place in the new age of Cirque du Soleil and Circus Of Horrors.