Caryl Brahms

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Caryl Brahms, born Doris Caroline Abrahams (1901 – 1982) was an English writer.

Caryl Brahms was born into a Sephardic Jewish family who had come to Britain from Turkey a generation earlier. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and began to write for the London Evening Standard, and later the Daily Telegraph, as ballet correspondent.

In 1937 she began her series of collaborations with S J Simon, with A Bullet in the Ballet, which introduced the phlegmatic Inspector Adam Quill and the excitable members of Vladimir Stroganoff’s ballet company. The same characters appeared in Casino for Sale (1938), Envoy on Excursion (1940) and Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945).

Brahms and Simon also wrote what they called ‘backstairs history’ producing their own highly unreliable and comic retellings of history – Elizabethan (No Bed for Bacon, 1941), Victorian (Don’t, Mr Disraeli, 1940), and Queen Anne to George V (No Nightingales).

After Simon’s death, Caryl Brahms wrote on her own and also in partnership with Ned Sherrin, adapting for television plays by Georges Feydeau, Sacha Guitry and Eugene Labiche, as well as producing original work for television and the theatre.

As a seasoned literary collaborator, Caryl Brahms was in a good position to write a book about Britain’s most famous theatrical collaboration, her 1975 Gilbert and Sullivan – Lost Chords and Discords. However, the book was controversial. One review said, "It is an opinionated work which is not amiss from a critic such as Brahms, but laced throughout there are sometimes juvenile, sometimes merely indulgent, interjections sure to delight some and quickly tire others."[1]