Caryl Brahms

Who was Caryl Brahms?

Caryl Brahms, born Doris Caroline Abrahams, 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 the Royal Academy of Music in London, Brahms was dissatisfied with her own skill as a pianist, leaving 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.