From 1966 to 1978, my sister Sheila Yarwood, who has died aged 91, was the theatre critic for the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, edited by Harry Pigott-Smith (father of the actor Tim). It was said by one within Royal Shakespeare Company circles that when a new production was not well reviewed by the national press, the response was: “Let’s wait until we see what Sheila says.”
Writing mostly as Sheila Bannock, and later Sarah Eiley-Wood (a near-anagram of her name), she was highly regarded as a theatre critic, reviewing most of the plays performed in Stratford, and the regional theatres, and occasionally writing for the nationals. In 1965 in the Herald, she gave Alan Ayckbourn a rave review for his comedy Relatively Speaking, the first of his 89 plays to become a hit.
In 1975 she gave an appreciative review in the Herald of a new play by students at South Warwickshire Further Education College (now Stratford-upon-Avon College), starting: “Sixteen is no great age to have written, directed and acted in your first full-length play.” She ended a lengthy interview with the young Ben Elton outlining his future plans with: “We shall have to wait and see.”
Sheila was born in Hendon, north-west London, one of three children of Ruth (nee Christie), a former telephonist, and John Yarwood, a finance officer with the Electricity Council. She went to Copthall county school in Mill Hill, and in 1951 became a student in the then fairly new department of drama at the University of Bristol. She was the first student to study English and drama as a combined degree. Her tutor, Glynne Wickham, spoke of her at his retirement (in 1982) as “among those brave spirits who ventured to read a subject when it did not exist”.
In 1960, she married Graham Bannock, an economist, and they lived for a time in Paris, where he worked for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They had three children, but separated around 1967, and later divorced. Sheila then lived in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, where she wrote for the Herald. In the early 70s, she applied for a job as press officer at the RSC in Stratford, but was rejected as it “was no job for a woman”. Some years later her daughter Alex applied for and got that job.
In 1985 Sheila moved to Bristol, where I lived and worked, and then in 1992 back to London, where she worked for the publisher Robert Hale (later Crowood Press), both as reader and as editor. In 2014 she moved to Gillingham, Dorset, again to be close to where I lived, and continued working with Hale’s into her late 80s.
Sheila is survived by her daughters, Alex and Sarah, and grandson, Finlay, and by me and our sister Daphne. Her son, Angus, predeceased her.
