LIKE all grand romantic gestures, this one has little regard for practical restraint. A band of British wellwishers are planning to ship a piano down river to Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected Burmese leader who has spent 12 of the past 18 years under house arrest.

Suu Kyi is an accomplished player but her piano is broken, partly through wear and tear and partly after she pumped the pedals too hard. It is also thought that she accidentally ruined some keys in anger in 2004 when she heard that her friend, the Burmese poet U Tin Moe, had been placed under house arrest.

The piano has been of enormous comfort to her over many years as well as to the people of Burma, who would stand outside her house to listen to her play. If they heard the piano they knew she was still alive.

Suu Kyi loves to play Bach and Scarlatti. But her favourite piece is Pachelbel’s Canon. She played it for her British husband, Michael Aris, on his last visit to her in 1997. He died two years later after she was prevented from visiting him.

Who will win? Can the world help?

What can the world do about the situation in Burma? Will it make any difference? Who, if anyone, can really have an influence?

Multimedia

• In pictures: Burma violence

• Video: protests in Rangoon

Background

• Burmese bloggers defy the censors

• After 45 years, is this the end?

• How monks became threat to regime survival

• World split over response to Burma crisis

• Burma: a travellers' guide

Now a group of British women from the world of arts and entertainment plan to deliver a new piano to the Nobel peace prize winner. The gift is being organised by the actress Maureen Lipman, who has for years been an ardent supporter of Suu Kyi, along with Annie Lennox, the singer, Norma Heyman, the film producer who is the mother of David Heyman who makes the Harry Potter movies, and Joyce Hytner, the arts fundraiser who is the mother of Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre.

“It just seemed a good and nice idea,” said Lipman, who starred in The Pianist, the Oscar-winning Roman Polanksi film.

The money for a new piano has already been raised, although it is important to ensure that the one purchased can withstand the tropical humidity of Rangoon and the plagues of white ants. Sheet music has also been organised.

The venture is reminiscent of Jane Campion’s film The Piano, in which a mute woman (Holly Hunter) is taken with her young daughter and prized piano to New Zealand in the 1850s for an arranged marriage.

It also has similarities with Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, which told how a Peruvian rubber baron purchased a steamer to sail the instrument up the Amazon and build an opera house. At one stage he had to haul the vessel up a waterfall.

Suu Kyi’s piano could be transported by boat all the way, as Rangoon is a port on a river estuary, about 50 miles from the coast. First it would have to be flown to India or Singapore and then transferred to a ship.

One idea is that Lipman and some other friends would accompany the piano and present it to Suu Kyi, who was elected democratically as the country’s leader in 1990 but has never taken power.

“The idea of a piano for her is a marvellous thought,” said Martin Morland, a former British ambassador to Burma who now chairs the charity Prospect Burma, which provides money to educate young Burmese.

“The generals probably wouldn’t know how to react if it arrived. They would go into a trance. But you would probably still need some form of application to get it in.”

Lipman and her friends are still a bit wary about whether Suu Kyi would accept the piano because she is so modest and also because she might think that it would be wrong to receive such a gift when her citizens were suffering.

However, it might be easier to get the piano to her now than it would have been two months ago before the uprising of the monks. China, which has wide-ranging influence in Burma, is wary of further disturbances and the presence of Ibrahim Gambari, the United Nations ambassador, in the country could also carry weight. The generals have recently appointed a representative to liaise between the junta and Suu Kyi.

“I think she’d see the piano as a gesture of solidarity with her supporters in Burma itself and with those overseas,” said Richard Shannon, whose play about Suu Kyi, The Lady of Burma, will open at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London, on Thursday.

Suu Kyi keeps in touch with the outside world through the BBC World Service and her doctor. During her house arrest, her quiet defiance has been admired by millions and has inspired many in the entertainment industry: U2’s song Walk On is both about her and dedicated to her and Damien Rice, the singer, wrote and played his Unplayed Piano to highlight her plight after he visited Burma in 2004.

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