Claire van Kampen obituary

Claire van Kampen, who has died of cancer aged 71, was a concert pianist, a musical director and composer of some distinction. Latterly she was a playwright and director, often in association with her husband, Mark Rylance.

Their most distinguished collaboration was on the West End and Broadway hit Farinelli and the King (2015), a candlelit piece (written by Van Kampen) based on the true story of King Philip V of Spain (played by Rylance) who took refuge from his bipolar depression in the ethereal singing of the famous Italian castrato Farinelli (sung by the countertenor Iestyn Davies).

Sometimes compared by critics to a cross between Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and Alan Bennett’s The Madness of King George III, the piece was more fragile and suggestive than either, cleverly juxtaposing a quasi-bipolar condition in Farinelli himself, played in low key by an actor, shadowed by the singer achieving celestial sublimity, not least in two great arias from Handel’s Rinaldo.

Van Kampen incorporated other staples of the Renaissance castrato repertoire in Farinelli and the King. This period of music was her forte, Van Kampen having become much taken with it after meeting, while still a student, David Munrow, one of the founders of the Early Music Consort.

Her research into the music of the Tudor period placed her in an ideal position to complement Debbie Wiseman’s score with Tudor musical interludes for the blockbuster TV production of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015); she also complemented the performance of Rylance as Thomas Cromwell.

The couple had met in the rehearsal room at the National Theatre in 1987, where, as musical director on The Wandering Jew, a baggy 19th-century prose work by Eugène Sue, she noted his legs. It was a coup de foudre and, for Rylance, a life-changing moment that took him towards her kind of classical music.

Van Kampen was first married to the architect Chris Perret, but he agreed to a divorce – they had two daughters, the elder of whom, Juliet, now an actor, took on her new stepfather’s surname. In 1989, Van Kampen was musical director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and wrote the music for Rylance’s temperamental, pyjama-clad Hamlet.

In the 1990s, they formed their own touring company, Phoebus’ Cart, and produced a 1991 new age version of The Tempest (Rylance as Prospero, music byVan Kampen) in a muddy Oxfordshire field, next to the Rollright Stones. There, too, they had been married on the winter solstice in December 1989.

The same production played at the Globe (now Gielgud) on Shaftesbury Avenue, but not before it had already visited Corfe Castle and, more significantly, the cement pit on the South Bank of the Thames that formed the foundation of the future Shakespeare’s Globe.

When Rylance was appointed first artistic director at that theatre in 1996, Van Kampen was fully equipped to be the first musical director, and stayed on when Rylance’s successor, Dominic Dromgoole, took over in 2006, as senior research fellow in early modern music, and creative associate. She returned to the Globe to make her debut as a director in 2018 and did a fine explanatory job on Othello, in which Rylance stole the show as a wheedling Iago.

Born in north London, Claire was the only child of Paul van Kampen, a businessman, and his wife, Ruth (nee Relph). Her father died when she was 12, so her mother went out to work as a secretary to pay for Claire’s piano lessons, though she was already teaching pupils of her own by the age of 14. She trained at the Royal College of Music for five years and graduated as a concert pianist and composer.

Outside the Globe, she wrote an original score for Sam Shepard’s True West on Broadway in 2000 (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman), and incidental music for an irresistible West End 2007 revival of Marc Camoletti’s 60s farce Boeing Boeing, with Rylance as a Stan Laurel-esque stooge to Roger Allam’s lascivious adventurer, involving three air hostesses.

Back at the Globe, in 2009, I loved her music for a Frank McGuinness version of Euripides’ Helen – not of Troy, but of Egypt – in which Helen (played by Penny Downie) cavorted with a backing group including a falsetto. The play had not been seen since the great cycle of Greek plays by John Barton for the RSC in 1980.

In 2013, the New York Times congratulated her on bringing sackbuts to Broadway, along with pipes, tabors, shawms and hurdy-gurdy, for the Globe’s all-male productions of Twelfth Night (Rylance as Olivia) and Richard III (guess who). She shared the composer credits with the Elizabethan maestros John Dowland and Thomas Morley.

Another wacky project with Rylance was her production of Nice Fish (2016), written by Rylance with the poet Louis Jenkins, a comedy about an ice-fishing expedition, which offered complimentary tickets to anyone who turned up at the Harold Pinter theatre dressed as a fisherman, or indeed a fish.

Her last theatre work, in 2024, was an evocative score for the RSC’s Pericles in Stratford-upon-Avon and another for Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey at the Gielgud, with Rylance as Captain Boyle. Their careers, for better and worse, were inextricably entwined.

In 2019 Van Kampen was honoured with a doctorate in music from Brunel University.

She is survived by Rylance and her daughter Juliet. Another daughter from her first marriage, Nataasha, a film-maker, died in 2012.

• Claire Louise van Kampen, pianist, composer, writer and director, born 3 November 1953; died 18 January 2025