I was musical associate at the Leicester Haymarket theatre when Yuri Lyubimov directed a touring production of his Taganka theatre Hamlet.
Lyubimov had the idea that, during Hamlet’s soliloquy, he would have a Highland bagpiper slowly process upstage playing a lament. It was a beautiful image, marred only by the fact that Jimmy Ford’s bagpipes completely obliterated Daniel Webb’s subtle delivery of the text. We pointed out that, unfortunately, bagpipes have no dynamic variation and cannot be played more softly, so the solution was to find a different kind of pipe (given that Jimmy had been hired for the whole tour).
We eventually settled on the gentle Flemish pipes – of the kind seen in the paintings of Brueghel. However, unlike the Scottish pipes, where the air reservoir is filled by blowing, the Flemish bellows are sustained by under-arm pressure, a technique that Jimmy had never encountered. The solution, then, was to have the Flemish pipes specially adapted so that the reservoir could be filled with air via a tube like the highland pipes, and to play them as if they were, in fact, Scottish pipes.
It was a lengthy process to get this done, and in the end it worked very well. But it was clear from the outset that there was no way that Lyubimov’s basic idea of using bagpipes could have been questioned in any way.
