The novel, A Severed Head, was adapted as a play in a collaboration between Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley. The play had a trial run in Bristol, England, in 1963, then ran to critical acclaim in London for two and one-half years. Columbia Pictures released a film version in 1970. The play is seldom staged, but the film still runs occasionally in museums and art houses. It is the only internationally successful play that Murdoch, one of the foremost British novelists of her generation, ever wrote.

Although the play was a collaboration, it is apparent that Priestley’s main role was in structuring it for the stage. Many of Murdoch’s stock characters and her novelistic devices are immediately recognizable. Significantly, Honor is Jewish, a member of an ethnic group often used in Murdoch’s novels to indicate special powers, such as the memorable Julius King in A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970). Martin is one of Murdoch’s typical male protagonists, a self-deceived man who must undergo several painful experiences before he accepts the reality of other people. Only after Antonia leaves him for Palmer does he understand he has been living in a dream world.

Symmetrical pairing of lovers is also one of Murdoch’s favorite plot devices, one that has long been a staple of playwrights. This device drives the plot of her novel Nuns and Soldiers (1980), which has no fewer than six romantic pairings, as well as the plot of A Severed Head, in which the couplings and separations of the three pairs of lovers are handled with irony, wit, and a certain amount of irrationality.