Caryl Brahms

Doris Caroline Abrahams (8 December 1901 – 5 December 1982), commonly known by the pseudonym Caryl Brahms, was an English critic, novelist, and journalist specialising in the theatre and ballet. She also wrote film, radio and television scripts.

As a student at London's Royal Academy of Music, Brahms was dissatisfied with her own skill as a pianist, and left without graduating. She contributed light verse, and later stories for satirical cartoons, to the London paper The Evening Standard in the late 1920s. She recruited a friend, S. J. Simon, to help her with the cartoon stories, and, in the 1930s and 40s, they collaborated on a series of comic novels, some with a balletic background and others set in various periods of English history. At the same time as her collaboration with Simon, Brahms was a ballet critic, writing for papers including The Daily Telegraph. Later, her interest in ballet waned, and she concentrated on reviewing plays.

After Simon's sudden death in 1948, Brahms wrote solo for some years but, in the 1950s, she established a second long-running collaboration with the writer and broadcaster Ned Sherrin, which lasted for the rest of her life. Together they wrote plays and musicals for the stage and television, and published both fiction and non-fiction books.

Life and career

Early years Brahms was born in Croydon, Surrey. Her parents were Henry Clarence Abrahams, a jeweller, and his wife, Pearl née Levi, a member of a Sephardic Jewish family who had come to Britain from the Ottoman Empire a generation earlier. She was educated at Minerva College, Leicestershire and at the Royal Academy of Music, where she left before graduating. Her biographer Ned Sherrin wrote, "already an embryo critic, she did not care to listen to the noise she made when playing the piano." In 1926, the artist David Low began to draw a series of satirical cartoons for the Evening Standard, featuring a small dog named "Mussolini" (later shortened to "Musso", after protests from the Italian embassy).

In 1930, Brahms published a volume of poems for children, The Moon on My Left, illustrated by Anna Zinkeisen. The Times Literary Supplement judged the verses to be in the tradition of A. A. Milne, "but the disciple's gift is too frequently spoiled by her lack of control. She uses too many capital letters, and too many exclamation marks, too many round O's in long chains, and she is too facetious". The reviewer quoted with approval an extract from one of her poems, a child's thoughts by candlelight:

This was followed the next year by a second volume, Sung Before Six, published under a different pen-name, Oliver Linden. She reverted to her more familiar pseudonym for a third volume, Curiouser and Curiouser, published in 1932. The reception of A Bullet in the Ballet the following year was even warmer. In the TLS, David Murray wrote that the book provoked "continuous laughter. … Old Stroganoff with his troubles, artistic, amorous and financial, his shiftiness, and his perpetual anxiety about the visit of the great veteran of ballet-designers – 'if 'e come', is a vital creation. ... The book stands out for shockingness and merriment." The sexual entanglements, both straight and gay, of the members of the Ballet Stroganoff are depicted with a cheerful matter-of-factness unusual in the 1930s. Murray commented, "True, a certain number of the laughs are invited for a moral subject that people used not to mention with such spade-like explicitness, if at all." In the 1980s, Michael Billington praised the writing: "a power of language of which Wodehouse would not have been ashamed. As a description of a domineering Russian mother put down by her ballerina daughter, you could hardly better: 'She backed away like a defeated steamroller.'"

The book was a best-seller in the UK, and was published in an American edition by Doubleday. The authors followed up their success with a sequel, Casino for Sale (1938), featuring all the survivors from the first novel and bringing to the fore Stroganoff's rival impresario, the rich and vulgar Lord Buttonhooke. It was published in the US as Murder à la Stroganoff. A third Stroganoff novel, Envoy on Excursion (1940) was a comic spy-thriller, with Quill now working for British intelligence.

In 1940, Brahms and Simon published the first of what they called "backstairs history", producing their own highly unreliable comic retellings of English history. Don't, Mr. Disraeli! is a Victorian Romeo and Juliet story, with affairs of the feuding middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families interspersed with 19th-century vignettes (Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savage Club, for example) and anachronistic intruders from the 20th century, including Harpo Marx, John Gielgud and Albert Einstein. In The Observer, Frank Swinnerton wrote, "They turn the Victorian age into phantasmagoria, dodging with the greatest possible nimbleness from the private to the public, skipping among historic scenes, which they often deride, and personal jokes and puns, and telling a ridiculous story while they communicate a preposterous – yet strangely suggestive – impression of nineteenth-century life."

Brahms and Simon depict Shakespeare dithering over the spelling of his signature. To follow their Victorian book, Brahms and Simon went back to Elizabethan times, with No Bed for Bacon (1941). Unlike the earlier work, the narrative and allusions are confined to the age in which the book is set. The plot concerns a young woman who disguises herself as a boy to gain membership of Richard Burbage's and William Shakespeare's, theatrical company (a device later employed by Tom Stoppard as the central plot of his 1999 screenplay Shakespeare in Love). Reviewing the book in the Shakespeare Quarterly, Ernest Brennecke wrote:

in 1943, Brahms published her first solo prose work, a study of the dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann. The reviewer in The Musical Times commended it as "a good deal more than a tribute to Robert Helpmann ... its enthusiasm is of the informed variety that inspires respect, the more so as it is balanced and sane." Among Brahms's many digressions from the main subject of the book was a section, praised in The Musical Times, explaining why the appropriation of symphonic music for ballet is as unsatisfactory to the ballet purist as to the music lover. Brahms included snippets of overheard remarks, confirming, as the reviewer noted, that "ballet audiences are the least musical of all; are they also among the least intelligent?" Brahms's own enthusiasm for ballet remained intact for the time being, but it was later to dwindle.

Collaborations with S. J. Simon

1937 A Bullet in the Ballet. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 752997851 1938 Casino for Sale. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 558706784. (Published in America as Murder à la Stroganoff. New York: Doubleday, Doran. 1938. OCLC 11309700) 1939 The Elephant is White. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 558706826 1940 Envoy on Excursion. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 154388199 1940 Don't, Mr. Disraeli!. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 462681016 1941 No Bed for Bacon. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 558706853 1944 No Nightingales. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 558706895 1945 Six Curtains for Stroganova. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 9495601. (Published in America as Six Curtains for Natasha. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. 1946. OCLC 1040925) 1946 Trottie True. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 475946887 1947 To Hell with Hedda! and other stories. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 8298701 1950 You Were There – Eat, drink, and be merry, for yesterday you died. London: Michael Joseph. OCLC 154216656

Brahms and Sherrin After Simon's death, Brahms was sure that she never wished to collaborate with any other writer. and a melodramatic romantic novel, Away Went Polly (1952), of which the critic Julian Symons wrote, "Miss Brahms is perhaps aiming at elegant sophistication; she achieves more often the ecstatically thrilled note of a saleswoman in a high-class dress shop." She expanded her range as a critic to include opera and drama as well as ballet. but was not a box-office success. It was based on a radio play that Brahms and Sherrin had written in 1957.

In 1963, Brahms published her second solo novel, No Castanets, a gently humorous work about the Braganza empire in Brazil. When Sherrin became a television producer in the 1960s, he and Brahms always wrote the weekly topical opening number for the ground-breaking satirical show That Was The Week That Was and its successors. merely confused the subject. In The Guardian, Stephen Dixon wrote that Brahms "manages to coast over the fact that we've heard it all before by going off at entertaining tangents in a series of anecdotes, personal interpolations, witty irrelevancies and theories." The following year, she published Reflections in a Lake: A Study of Chekhov's Greatest Plays.

Brahms never married. Frederic Raphael observed that "her one true love", Jack Bergel, was killed in the Second World War. She died at her flat in Regent's Park, London aged 80.