Caryl Brahms
Encyclopedia
Caryl Brahms, born Doris Caroline Abrahams (8 December 1901 – 5 December 1982) 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.
, near London. 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 Turkey 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."
While at the Academy, Brahms wrote light verse for the student magazine. The London evening newspaper The Evening Standard began to print some of her verses. Brahms adopted her pen-name so that her parents should not learn of her activities: they envisaged "a more domestic future" for her than journalism. The name "Caryl" was also usefully ambiguous as regards gender. 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). Brahms was engaged to write the stories for the cartoons.
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.
, whom she had met at a hostel when they were both students. The partnership was successful, and Brahms and Simon started to write comic thrillers together. The first, A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputising for Arnold Haskell
as dance critic of The Daily Telegraph
. Brahms proposed a murder mystery set in the ballet world with Haskell as the corpse. Simon took the suggestion as a joke, but Brahms insisted that they press ahead with the plot (although Haskell was not a victim in the finished work). The book introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the excitable members of Vladimir Stroganoff's ballet company, who later reappeared in three more books between 1938 and 1945. Some thought that Stroganoff was based on the impresario Sergei Diaghilev
, but Brahms pointed out that Diaghilev appears briefly in the novels in his own right, and she said of Stroganoff, "Suddenly he was there. I used to have the impression that he wrote us, rather than that we wrote him."
Before the novel was complete, Brahms published her first prose book, Footnotes to the Ballet (1936), a symposium edited (or as the title page read "assembled") by Brahms, with contributors including Haskell, Constant Lambert
, Alexandre Benois
, Anthony Asquith
and Lydia Sokolova
. The book was well received; the anonymous Times Literary Supplement (TLS) reviewer singled out Brahms's own contributions for particular praise. 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 Observer
, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers
) commented on the "sexual reminiscences of infinite variety" and called the novel "a delicious little satire" but "not a book for the old girl". 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 U.S. as Murder à la Stroganoff. The Elephant is White (1939), tells the story of a young Englishman and the complications arising from his visit to a Russian night club in Paris. It was not well reviewed. 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."
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 1944, 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.
With Simon, Brahms completed four more novels and a collection of short stories. No Nightingales (1944) is set in a house in Berkeley Square
, haunted by two benevolent ghosts coping with new occupants between the reigns of Queen Anne and George V
. Titania has a Mother (1944) is a satirical jumble of pantomime, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945) was the collaborators' last ballet novel. Trottie True (1946) is a back-stage comedy set in the era of Edwardian musical comedy
. To Hell with Hedda (1947) is a collection of short stories.
In 1948, the collaborators had begun work on another book, You Were There, when Simon suddenly died, aged 44. Brahms completed the work, which she described as "less a novel than an out-of-date newsreel", covering the period from the death of Queen Victoria to 1928. Reviewing the book, Lionel Hale wrote, "The vivacity of this raffish chronicle is unflagging."
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.
In 1954, Brahms received a letter from the young Ned Sherrin
asking her permission to adapt No Bed for Bacon as a stage musical. Her first reaction was to ring him to prevent him from going any further, but his voice "sounded so young and so nice" that Brahms gave in. She agreed to collaborate with Sherrin on the adaptation. It was well-reviewed, but was not a box-office success. Nonetheless, in Sherrin's words, "it laid the foundation of a partnership which over the next twenty-eight years produced seven books, many radio and television scripts, and several plays and musicals for the theatre." In 1962 they published a novel, Cindy-Ella – or, I Gotta Shoe, described in the TLS as "a charming, sophisticated fairy-tale … retelling the Cinderella story rather as a coloured New Orleans mother might tell it to her (precocious) daughter". It was based on a radio play that Brahms and Sherrin had written in 1957. At the end of 1962 they adapted it again, as a stage musical, starring Cleo Laine
, Elisabeth Welch
and Cy Grant
.
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. Their collaboration won them the Ivor Novello award
for the best screen song.
By the 1960s, Brahms's enthusiasm for ballet was waning. She later commented, "Really I've left the ballet behind me because I became very bored with watching the girl in the third row moving forward to be in the second row; and when you have lost that feeling, you are no longer the person to write about ballet." Her professional focus, both as a critic and as an author, was increasingly the theatre. Privately, her enthusiasm for ballet transferred itself to show-jumping, of which she became a devotee.
With Sherrin, Brahms wrote and adapted prolifically for the theatre and television. Their collaborations included Benbow Was His Name, televised in 1964, staged in 1969; The Spoils (adapted from Henry James
's The Spoils of Poynton
, 1968; Sing a Rude Song, a musical biography of Marie Lloyd
, 1969; adaptations of farces by Georges Feydeau
, Fish Out of Water, 1971, and Paying the Piper (1972); a Charles Dickens
play, Nickleby and Me, 1975; Beecham, 1980, a celebration of the great conductor
; and The Mitford Girls, 1981. For BBC television, they adapted a long sequence of Feydeau farces between 1968 and 1973 under the series title Ooh! La-la! She was a member of the board of the National Theatre
from 1974 until her death.
As a critic and columnist, Brahms wrote for many publications, principally The Evening Standard. She included an account of her theatrical experiences in a book of memoirs, The Rest of the Evening's My Own (1964), and left a second volume of reminiscences unfinished at her death, which Sherrin edited and augmented as Too Dirty for the Windmill (1986). For television the collaborators devised a series of programmes about songs from musicals, on which they later based a book, Song by Song – Fourteen Great Lyric Writers (1984) published after Brahms's death.
in his notebooks. The reviewer of the TLS welcomed the reappearance of Stroganoff and judged the Chekhov stories "impressive in their evocation of another era and in their tribute to a more serious and formal art."
Brahms never married. Frederick Raphael notes 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 81.
As a student at the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...
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
S. J. Simon
S.J. "Skid" Simon was a British author and bridge player. From 1937 until his death he collaborated with Caryl Brahms on a series of comic novels and short stories, mostly with a background of ballet or of English history...
, 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
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
. 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
Ned Sherrin
Edward George "Ned" Sherrin CBE was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC...
, 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.
Early years
Brahms was born in CroydonCroydon
Croydon is a town in South London, England, located within the London Borough of Croydon to which it gives its name. It is situated south of Charing Cross...
, near London. 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 Turkey a generation earlier. She was educated at Minerva College, Leicestershire
Leicestershire
Leicestershire is a landlocked county in the English Midlands. It takes its name from the heavily populated City of Leicester, traditionally its administrative centre, although the City of Leicester unitary authority is today administered separately from the rest of Leicestershire...
and at the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...
, where she left before graduating. Her biographer Ned Sherrin
Ned Sherrin
Edward George "Ned" Sherrin CBE was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC...
wrote, "already an embryo critic, she did not care to listen to the noise she made when playing the piano."
While at the Academy, Brahms wrote light verse for the student magazine. The London evening newspaper The Evening Standard began to print some of her verses. Brahms adopted her pen-name so that her parents should not learn of her activities: they envisaged "a more domestic future" for her than journalism. The name "Caryl" was also usefully ambiguous as regards gender. 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). Brahms was engaged to write the stories for the cartoons.
In 1930, Brahms published a volume of poems for children, The Moon on My Left, illustrated by Anna Zinkeisen
Anna Zinkeisen
Anna Katrina Zinkeisen was a Scottish painter and artist.in 1935, Anna Zinkeisen and her sister Doris Zinkeisen were commissioned by John Brown and Company Shipbuilders of Clydebank to paint the murals in the Verandah Grill of the famous ocean liner the RMS Queen Mary...
. The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
judged the verses to be in the tradition of A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne
Alan Alexander Milne was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.-Biography:A. A...
, "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:
- I like things round,
- I like the moon,
- And the smooth inside
- Of a silver spoon;
- I like pennies –
- And Sixpence too –
- I LIKE things round –
- Don't you?
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.
Brahms and Simon
Towards the end of the 1920s, finding it difficult to keep up the supply of new stories for Low's cartoon series, Brahms enlisted the help of a Russian friend, S. J. SimonS. J. Simon
S.J. "Skid" Simon was a British author and bridge player. From 1937 until his death he collaborated with Caryl Brahms on a series of comic novels and short stories, mostly with a background of ballet or of English history...
, whom she had met at a hostel when they were both students. The partnership was successful, and Brahms and Simon started to write comic thrillers together. The first, A Bullet in the Ballet, had its genesis in a frivolous fantasy spun by the collaborators when Brahms was deputising for Arnold Haskell
Arnold Haskell
Arnold Lionel Haskell was a British dance critic who founded the Camargo Society in 1930. With Ninette de Valois, he was influential in the development of the Royal Ballet School, later becoming the school's headmaster.He became fascinated by ballet when his mother prevailed on him to come with...
as dance critic of The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
. Brahms proposed a murder mystery set in the ballet world with Haskell as the corpse. Simon took the suggestion as a joke, but Brahms insisted that they press ahead with the plot (although Haskell was not a victim in the finished work). The book introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the excitable members of Vladimir Stroganoff's ballet company, who later reappeared in three more books between 1938 and 1945. Some thought that Stroganoff was based on the impresario Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Diaghilev
Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev , usually referred to outside of Russia as Serge, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise.-Early life and career:...
, but Brahms pointed out that Diaghilev appears briefly in the novels in his own right, and she said of Stroganoff, "Suddenly he was there. I used to have the impression that he wrote us, rather than that we wrote him."
Before the novel was complete, Brahms published her first prose book, Footnotes to the Ballet (1936), a symposium edited (or as the title page read "assembled") by Brahms, with contributors including Haskell, Constant Lambert
Constant Lambert
Leonard Constant Lambert was a British composer and conductor.-Early life:Lambert, the son of Russian-born Australian painter George Lambert, was educated at Christ's Hospital and the Royal College of Music...
, Alexandre Benois
Alexandre Benois
Alexandre Nikolayevich Benois , an influential artist, art critic, historian, preservationist, and founding member of Mir iskusstva , an art movement and magazine...
, Anthony Asquith
Anthony Asquith
Anthony Asquith was a leading English film director. He collaborated successfully with playwright Terence Rattigan on The Winslow Boy and The Browning Version , among other adaptations...
and Lydia Sokolova
Lydia Sokolova
Lydia Sokolova was an English ballerina. She trained at the Stedman Ballet Academy and learned from such luminaries as Anna Pavlova and Enrico Cecchetti....
. The book was well received; the anonymous Times Literary Supplement (TLS) reviewer singled out Brahms's own contributions for particular praise. 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 Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, "Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers
Edward Powys Mathers
Edward Powys Mathers was an English translator and poet, and also a pioneer of compiling advanced cryptic crosswords....
) commented on the "sexual reminiscences of infinite variety" and called the novel "a delicious little satire" but "not a book for the old girl". In the 1980s, Michael Billington
Michael Billington (critic)
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. Drama critic of The Guardian since October 1971, he is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts; most notably, he is the authorised...
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 U.S. as Murder à la Stroganoff. The Elephant is White (1939), tells the story of a young Englishman and the complications arising from his visit to a Russian night club in Paris. It was not well reviewed. 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
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
story, with affairs of the feuding middle-class Clutterwick and Shuttleforth families interspersed with 19th century vignettes (Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...
at the Savage Club
Savage Club
The Savage Club, founded in 1857 is a gentlemen's club in London.-History:Many and varied are the stories that have been told about the first meeting of the Savage Club, of the precise purposes for which it was formed, and of its christening...
, for example) and anachronistic intruders from the 20th century, including Harpo Marx
Harpo Marx
Adolph "Harpo" Marx was an American comedian and film star. He was the second oldest of the Marx Brothers. His comic style was influenced by clown and pantomime traditions. He wore a curly reddish wig, and never spoke during performances...
, John Gielgud
John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937...
and Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
. 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."
To follow their Victorian book, Brahms and Simon went back to Elizabethan
Elizabethan era
The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...
times, with No Bed for Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
(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
Richard Burbage
Richard Burbage was an English actor and theatre owner. He was the younger brother of Cuthbert Burbage. They were both actors in drama....
's and William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's, theatrical company (a device later employed by Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
as the central plot of his 1999 screenplay Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 British-American comedy film directed by John Madden and written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard....
). Reviewing the book in the Shakespeare Quarterly, Ernest Brennecke wrote:
in 1944, Brahms published her first solo prose work, a study of the dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann
Robert Helpmann
Sir Robert Helpmann CBE was an Australian dancer, actor, theatre director and choreographer.-Early years:He was born Robert Murray Helpman in Mount Gambier, South Australia and also boarded at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide. From childhood, Helpman had a strong desire to be a dancer...
. The reviewer in The Musical Times
The Musical Times
The Musical Times is an academic journal of classical music edited and produced in the United Kingdom. It is currently the oldest such journal that is still publishing in the UK, having been published continuously since 1844. It was published as The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular until...
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.
With Simon, Brahms completed four more novels and a collection of short stories. No Nightingales (1944) is set in a house in Berkeley Square
Berkeley Square
Berkeley Square is a town square in the West End of London, England, in the City of Westminster. It was originally laid out in the mid 18th century by architect William Kent...
, haunted by two benevolent ghosts coping with new occupants between the reigns of Queen Anne and George V
George V of the United Kingdom
George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War until his death in 1936....
. Titania has a Mother (1944) is a satirical jumble of pantomime, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945) was the collaborators' last ballet novel. Trottie True (1946) is a back-stage comedy set in the era of Edwardian musical comedy
Edwardian Musical Comedy
Edwardian musical comedies were British musical theatre shows from the period between the early 1890s, when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas' dominance had ended, until the rise of the American musicals by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Cole Porter following World War I.Between...
. To Hell with Hedda (1947) is a collection of short stories.
In 1948, the collaborators had begun work on another book, You Were There, when Simon suddenly died, aged 44. Brahms completed the work, which she described as "less a novel than an out-of-date newsreel", covering the period from the death of Queen Victoria to 1928. Reviewing the book, Lionel Hale wrote, "The vivacity of this raffish chronicle is unflagging."
Brahms and Sherrin
After Simon's death, Brahms was sure that she never wished to collaborate with any other writer. Her solo works from this period were A Seat at the Ballet (1951) a guide for newcomers, and a melodramatic romantic novel, Away Went Polly (1952), of which the critic Julian SymonsJulian Symons
Julian Gustave Symons 1912 - 1994) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature.-Life and work:...
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.
In 1954, Brahms received a letter from the young Ned Sherrin
Ned Sherrin
Edward George "Ned" Sherrin CBE was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC...
asking her permission to adapt No Bed for Bacon as a stage musical. Her first reaction was to ring him to prevent him from going any further, but his voice "sounded so young and so nice" that Brahms gave in. She agreed to collaborate with Sherrin on the adaptation. It was well-reviewed, but was not a box-office success. Nonetheless, in Sherrin's words, "it laid the foundation of a partnership which over the next twenty-eight years produced seven books, many radio and television scripts, and several plays and musicals for the theatre." In 1962 they published a novel, Cindy-Ella – or, I Gotta Shoe, described in the TLS as "a charming, sophisticated fairy-tale … retelling the Cinderella story rather as a coloured New Orleans mother might tell it to her (precocious) daughter". It was based on a radio play that Brahms and Sherrin had written in 1957. At the end of 1962 they adapted it again, as a stage musical, starring Cleo Laine
Cleo Laine
Dame Cleo Laine, Lady Dankworth, DBE is a jazz singer and an actress, noted for her scat singing and vocal range...
, Elisabeth Welch
Elisabeth Welch
thumb|right|200pxElisabeth Welch was an American born singer, actress, and entertainer whose career spanned seven decades, many years of which she was based in Britain....
and Cy Grant
Cy Grant
Cy Grant was a Guyanese actor, singer, writer and poet, who in the 1950s became the first black person to appear regularly on British television...
.
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
That Was The Week That Was
That Was The Week That Was, also known as TW3, is a satirical television comedy programme that was shown on BBC Television in 1962 and 1963. It was devised, produced and directed by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost...
and its successors. Their collaboration won them the Ivor Novello award
Ivor Novello Awards
The Ivor Novello Awards, named after the Cardiff born entertainer Ivor Novello, are awards for songwriting and composing. They are presented annually in London by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and were first introduced in 1955.Nicknamed The Ivors, the awards take place...
for the best screen song.
By the 1960s, Brahms's enthusiasm for ballet was waning. She later commented, "Really I've left the ballet behind me because I became very bored with watching the girl in the third row moving forward to be in the second row; and when you have lost that feeling, you are no longer the person to write about ballet." Her professional focus, both as a critic and as an author, was increasingly the theatre. Privately, her enthusiasm for ballet transferred itself to show-jumping, of which she became a devotee.
With Sherrin, Brahms wrote and adapted prolifically for the theatre and television. Their collaborations included Benbow Was His Name, televised in 1964, staged in 1969; The Spoils (adapted from Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
's The Spoils of Poynton
The Spoils of Poynton
The Spoils of Poynton is a novel by Henry James, first published under the title The Old Things as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then as a book in 1897. This half-length novel describes the struggle between Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, and her son Owen over...
, 1968; Sing a Rude Song, a musical biography of Marie Lloyd
Marie Lloyd
Matilda Alice Victoria Wood was an English music hall singer, best known as Marie Lloyd. Her ability to add lewdness to the most innocent of lyrics led to frequent clashes with the guardians of morality...
, 1969; adaptations of farces by Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau
Georges Feydeau was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque. He is remembered for his many lively farces.-Biography:Georges Feydeau was born in Paris, the son of novelist Ernest-Aimé Feydeau and Léocadie Bogaslawa Zalewska. At the age of twenty, Feydeau wrote his first comic...
, Fish Out of Water, 1971, and Paying the Piper (1972); a Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
play, Nickleby and Me, 1975; Beecham, 1980, a celebration of the great conductor
Thomas Beecham
Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...
; and The Mitford Girls, 1981. For BBC television, they adapted a long sequence of Feydeau farces between 1968 and 1973 under the series title Ooh! La-la! She was a member of the board of the National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
from 1974 until her death.
As a critic and columnist, Brahms wrote for many publications, principally The Evening Standard. She included an account of her theatrical experiences in a book of memoirs, The Rest of the Evening's My Own (1964), and left a second volume of reminiscences unfinished at her death, which Sherrin edited and augmented as Too Dirty for the Windmill (1986). For television the collaborators devised a series of programmes about songs from musicals, on which they later based a book, Song by Song – Fourteen Great Lyric Writers (1984) published after Brahms's death.
Last years
In 1975, Brahms published a study of Gilbert and Sullivan and their works. The book was lavishly illustrated, but her text, marred by numerous factual errors, 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. Among her last works of fiction were new short stories about Stroganoff, included in her collection Stroganoff in Company (1980), which also included some stories developed from ideas jotted down by Anton ChekhovAnton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
in his notebooks. The reviewer of the TLS welcomed the reappearance of Stroganoff and judged the Chekhov stories "impressive in their evocation of another era and in their tribute to a more serious and formal art."
Brahms never married. Frederick Raphael notes that "her one true love", Jack Bergel, was killed in the Second World War. She died at her flat in Regent's Park
Regent's Park
Regent's Park is one of the Royal Parks of London. It is in the north-western part of central London, partly in the City of Westminster and partly in the London Borough of Camden...
, London aged 81.