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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.
Yet that was not enough. After the tragic early death of her daughter Nataasha, she determined not to shrink into grief, but to bust out of any chrysalis that may have previously enveloped her. She wrote music for operas, ballets and films; she directed with success at the Globe and in the West End. She seemed uncontainable. Most impressively, she wrote a new play for us, Farinelli and the King, which opened in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, then migrated to the West End and Broadway. A first time writer with a Tony nomination! All born out of a woman’s ferocious and proud resolution that tragedy would not define her.
The Globe was a miracle when it opened – even its own board had cooked up a financial plan predicated on its failure. That miracle was in large part down to Mark, but in similar measure to Claire. Her music was a factor in that success, but yet more her comprehensive theatrical nous, and above all her spirit. A sort of preternatural joy emanated from her, sometimes expressed in that smile, often in a filthy braying laugh, often in a quiet empathic kindness. She told Mark recently it had always been her desire to live life as “a splash of light for others”. She achieved that everywhere, and nowhere more than at the Globe. In my time there, to my good fortune, she carried on, and we collaborated on some 20 shows. Unkind souls had said she was only at the Globe in its first 10 years because of Mark: I often thought we were only there because of her.
Life with Claire was always outrageous fun. We partied through the night in Moscow, in Seoul, in Shanghai, and many a time in New York. Somehow she could sustain the look of someone who had just woken up, excited by the world, for hours on end, whether in a dingy shebeen or a potentate’s palace. Together with Mark, she had an old-fashioned dervish desire for whatever joy the world might offer. They saw the world in good-old polytheistic Technicolor, and wondered why others succumbed to black and white.
What I most treasured about her was her intelligence, by which I don’t mean the thin soup of university learning, but the rich feast of reading the world and art and people with brilliance. The best word to capture that capacity is that old Germanic, Anglo-Saxon monosyllable – bright. Bright in chat at breakfast, shining bright in ideas at work, bright of heart when colleagues or friends needed light. She was the essence of bright.
The fuel for all that radiance came from an intimate circle; her first husband Chris, still with her at the end; her daughter Nataasha, who though she predeceased her never left her; Juliet, who somehow graduated from daughter into a trinity of daughter, sister and best friend; and Mark, with whom she formed a union wild and antic, modern and ancient, barmy and beautiful. A great many of us were blessed to live nearby.
Like many who loved her, and now feel her absence, I do not know which way to turn.
