Claire van Kampen: a world-class theatre composer and bright star of Shakespeare’s Globe

The pianist, director and playwright of Farinelli and the King, which starred her husband Mark Rylance, is remembered by the Globe’s former artistic director

Claire van Kampen, theatre director and composer, dies aged 71

On the first afternoon of rehearsals for any new show, I would ask Claire to push past the awkwardness and nerves of new beginnings with some group singing. Within a couple of hours, her galvanic energy and shining eyes would have a group of strangers harmonising together with a gusto they had not felt since childhood. Ten days ago, when she first went under palliative care in a German clinic, a devoted community on WhatsApp formed and then grew, to feed messages to her through Mark, her husband, and her daughter, Juliet. Anecdotes of Claire in excelsis were shared, some ribald, some tender and others filthy; old photos of her dazzly smile accumulated; insights which Claire had rained on the world for free were appreciated; and tears were spilt over how remorselessly she had spread light. Even under sedation, Claire could still get a wide and diverse group from across the world to sing together.

Claire was all art. A piano prodigy as a youth, she became one of the world’s great theatre composers, whose work was heard at the RSC, the National, the Globe and eventually everywhere. No one has ever set a Shakespearean song better than her – her versions of the closing songs to Twelfth Night and Love’s Labour’s Lost are definitive; no one knew better how to drive a story with percussion; how to detonate some humour into a room with some oompah, nor how to make 1,000 hearts skip a beat with a single plaintive human voice. The Renaissance and her were natural companions – something about the openness and candour of that age, together with its bubbling humanity, found a natural interpreter in her.