General
Claire van Kampen, 71, Playwright and Arranger of Early Music World, Dies
After she married Mark Rylance, the two often collaborated; her specialty was arranging music for Tudor-era plays. Then she wrote a period piece of her own.
Claire van Kampen, who created authentic musical worlds for period works starring her husband, Mark Rylance, including Shakespearean plays and the TV show “Wolf Hall,” and who, late in her career, wrote a play herself, “Farinelli and the King,” which had a successful run on Broadway with Mr. Rylance as the lead, died on Saturday in Kassel, Germany. She was 71.
The cause was cancer, her daughter, Juliet Rylance, said on social media.
For most of her career, Ms. van Kampen was one of the many erudite, imaginative artists of the theater who stay behind the scenes.
She was a musical arranger and composer, and she often collaborated with and advised her husband, who Ben Brantley, the former New York Times theater critic, described in 2017 as “one of the greatest actors on the planet.”
Mr. Rylance was the inaugural artistic director of the Globe Theater in London, and Ms. van Kampen became its director of music, gaining masterful knowledge of a corpus of compositions from centuries ago that would help provide a setting for the theater’s Shakespearean repertory.
But as a child she had dreamed of being a writer, particularly of plays. In 2014, she approached Dominic Dromgoole, her husband’s successor at the Globe, with a script she’d begun to think about nearly a decade earlier. It concerned the relationship of King Philip V of Spain with a castrato named Farinelli.
Mr. Dromgoole said he was interested, but Ms. van Kampen thought little of their exchange. Later, she looked at the brochure for the Globe’s next season — and found her play on the list of works.
