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.
“Then I had to do it!” she told The Times. “I had nothing to lose.”
The play, “Farinelli and the King,” was critically acclaimed, sold out its run at the Globe and then moved to the West End of London before winding up at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, where it was directed by John Dove.
It tells the story of how Farinelli left behind stardom in opera houses across Europe in the early 18th century to sing personally for Philip V as the king experienced depression and insomnia. As played by Mr. Rylance, Philip is a ruler plagued by melancholia, rage and self-doubt. The audience first sees him lost in a strange world of his own, fishing in the goldfish bowl of his bedroom. By the end of the play, he finds redemption in the beauty of Farinelli’s voice.
Farinelli was played by two similar-looking 38-year-old Britons: Sam Crane, who spoke Farinelli’s dialogue, and Iestyn Davies, a celebrated countertenor, who stepped onstage when it was time for Farinelli to sing period arias by Handel and Porpora.
Ms. van Kampen made her musical choices to suit Mr. Davies’s voice, rather than to fit the esoteric style of castrated singers of yore. She had musicians and audience members sit onstage, as if they were all gathered at a royal court. The goings-on were lit partly by candles.
In a Critic’s Pick review, Mr. Brantley categorized the work as a “shimmering fairy tale for grown-ups” and called it “strangely enchanting.” Though he wrote that the script, a “Shakespearean pastiche with Pirandellian philosophizing and latter-day jokiness,” did not “always flow melodically,” he said that the play succeeded in sustaining through every scene “a feeling of twilight reverie.”
The play ran on Broadway from Dec. 17, 2017, until late March the next year, and it drew about 112,000 attendees, Playbill reported.
Ms. van Kampen was born on Nov. 3, 1953, in London. She gained an interest in Renaissance music during her girlhood thanks to meeting David Munrow, a charismatic recorder player who studied and performed early music. She trained as a pianist at the Royal College of Music in London, and she became the musical director of the Royal Shakespeare Company when she was 33.
She met Mr. Rylance soon thereafter while working on a production of “The Wandering Jew” in 1987. They married in 1989. The next year, they formed a theater company called Phoebus Cart, which staged unconventional productions of Shakespeare. The couple took out a second mortgage on their house to fund a 1991 “Tempest” on the site of the old Globe of Shakespeare’s time. They also helped lead the effort to reconstruct the theater, which opened in 1997.
Ms. van Kampen was the composer, arranger and musical director of productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III” that opened at the Belasco in 2013, both starring Mr. Rylance. Under her direction, the show featured a pit band of musicians who played Elizabethan instruments like the shawm, sackbut, theorbo, hurdy-gurdy, cittern, tabor and rauschpfeife.
In 2015, a soundtrack for “Wolf Hall,” a TV show starring Mr. Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, was released with Tudor-era music selected and arranged by Ms. van Kampen. In 2016, she directed a Brooklyn production of “Nice Fish,” a play focused on the very non-Shakespearean subject of ice fishing; it was written by Mr. Rylance and the poet Louis Jenkins.
Ms. van Kampen’s first marriage was to Chris van Kampen, an architect. Their daughter Natasha van Kampen died in 2012 of a brain hemorrhage she had on a flight from New York to London. In addition to Juliet — also a daughter from her first marriage, though she took Mr. Rylance’s name — she is survived by her husband.
“I’ve lost count of how many projects we’ve imagined, sitting there at our kitchen table,” Mr. Rylance told The Guardian in 2023 about his marriage. “Claire came to me with two children whom I raised with her and Chris, but we never had children of our own so, to some degree, our projects have been our children. They are an incredible, creative joy to us and Claire is the rock of my life.”
