Even a career as great as Darcey Bussell's is littered with 'what ifs'.
Darcey Bussell and Roberto Bolle in Winter Dreams, part of Darcey Bussell - Farewell. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Darcey Bussell's prodigious talent has fuelled her through an extraordinary career - but so much within the ballet profession is circumstantial, so much depends on the input of other people, that it's impossible not to speculate how different her career might have been had a few key elements been otherwise.
What if, for instance, Bussell had found a partner as fierily, inspirationally her opposite as Nureyev proved to be for Fonteyn? Bussell's height always made her pool of potential partners relatively small and it specifically forestalled the intriguing, if possibly combustive, partnership that she might have had with Irek Mukhamedov.
Looking back at the chemistry those two achieved in the single ballet associated with them, Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams, it's tantalising to wonder what would have happened to Bussell's very English temperament and very English technique if she had shared the stage with someone more overtly emotional and exotic than the two men who ended up as her regular guest partners. Igor Zelensky and Roberto Bolle are both fine technicians but neither of them are particularly exciting actors. Meanwhile Jonathan Cope, who matured so fabulously into his talent, was largely whipped out of Bussell's arena by the canny Sylvie Guillem.
The other big what if: what if there had been a choreographer around in The Royal to co-opt Bussell as his or her muse, as Frederick Ashton once used Fonteyn? MacMillan did of course choreograph two ballets for Bussell, but it was probably Christopher Wheeldon who got the best measure of her talent in the roles he created for her in Tryst and DGV. Who knows what would have happened had Wheeldon stayed in London and the two of them had made a whole sequence of ballets together, tailor made to Bussell's body and gifts?
But Wheeldon went to New York and although there are some who believe that Bussell might have flourished even more remarkably had she gone too, I think she was wise to stay. The Balanchine repertory at New York City Ballet would obviously have been a fabulous frame for her, but the full stylistic and emotional range of The Royal's repertory has been even better. Bussell in Sleeping Beauty is surely one of the great ballet memories of the last two decades.