Iris Murdoch and J.B. Priestley
Adaptations of the novels of Iris Murdoch are scarce. A review of IMDB records only four UK adaptations in total. The first, a 1963 adaptation of The Sandcastle for the long-running ITV Play of the Week series starred Anna Massey as Rain Carter and Michael Gwynn as William Mor. In 1974 a four-episode adaptation of An Unofficial Rose starred Maurice Denham, Ruth Dunning and Mary Morris. The BBC commissioned an excellent adaptation of The Bell in 1982 starring Tessa Peake-Jones and Ian Holm. While these three adaptations were made for television, there has been only one cinematic Murdoch adaptation – the 1970 film A Severed Head, again starring Ian Holm alongside Claire Bloom, Richard Attenborough and Lee Remick. The filmed version of A Severed Head used the play adaptation as its source material, rather than the novel – the opening titles confirm the adaptation is penned by Iris Murdoch and JB Priestley.
A Severed Head is perhaps Murdoch’s most successful foray into the world of theatre. The play premiered in 1963 at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, before transferring to the Criterion Theatre in London, where it ran for a respectable 1,044 performances. Less successfully, it ran for only 29 performances in New York. The London production starred, among others, Robert Hardy as Martin Lynch-Gibbon, Paul Eddington as Palmer Anderson and Sheila Burrell as Honor Klein.
The play is a sympathetically pared-down version of the novel, reducing the number of the latter’s wide-ranging locations to just three – the respective living quarters of Georgie Hands, Martin Lynch-Gibbon and Palmer Anderson. The plot, however, remains essentially the same, modified as necessary to accommodate the practical requirements of a stage adaptation.
Iris Murdoch co-wrote the script for A Severed Head with the playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley; Murdoch had struggled to adapt the novel herself. She and Priestley had met in the 1950s on a television programme and had become friends thereafter. Murdoch agreed to show Priestley her abandoned script and, after reviewing it, Priestley offered to assist in working on the adaptation. As a result, the two of them worked collaboratively to quickly complete it.
The friendship and more especially the working relationship between these two great figures of 20th-century literature seems initially unlikely. Priestley was nearing the end of his career and indeed A Severed Head was his last great theatrical success. Meanwhile Murdoch, while well into her novelist career, had much of her greatest work ahead of her. Priestley was an eclectic novelist and playwright, now perhaps best remembered for his 1945 play An Inspector Calls. While it may be surprising that he collaborated with Murdoch on the adaptation of A Severed Head, there are some interesting parallels between that play and one of Priestley’s early plays, Dangerous Corner. Priestley wrote Dangerous Corner in 1932, his second play after The Good Companions in 1931. Following an initial run in Glasgow, it transferred to the Lyric Theatre, London with a cast including Flora Robson, and it ran between May and September 1932.
Dangerous Corner is the first of Priestley’s so-called Time Plays, a number of dramas written during the 1930s and 1940s which have plots constructed around the concept of time having many forms rather than being purely linear. An Inspector Calls is the final play in this series which also includes Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (1937). Dangerous Corner uses the time construct in a circular fashion – the play opens with some of characters listening to the conclusion of a radio play which ends with a gunshot. The same gunshot is repeated towards the end of the final act, and this loops the play back to its opening. Ostensibly a mystery thriller, the point of this device is to avoid the eponymous ‘dangerous corner’ and to give the characters an alternative future where dark family secrets may remain concealed. It a daringly provocative play for the time it was written, containing as it does overt references to drug abuse, homosexuality, attempted rape, infidelity and theft. To a modern audience it could be dismissed as a mere potboiler, and Priestley himself was subsequently quite dismissive of the play. Despite this it has proven to have an enduring interest and is still regularly performed. In addition to theatrical productions, it was filmed by RKO Pictures in 1934 (with many of the more controversial themes removed or diluted) and it was even novelised in 1933 by author Ruth Holland (Priestley’s sister-in-law by his second marriage). There are certain elements of Dangerous Corner which strike interesting parallels with A Severed Head, and may indicate why Priestley would have been attracted to assisting with the adaptation of the latter.
The dramatic events of Dangerous Corner are all revealed retrospectively at a dinner party held by Robert and Freda Caplan. Robert is a director in a publishing house. The dinner party guests consist of Robert’s business partner Charles Stanford, Olwen Peel, a family friend, Freda’s brother Gordon, his wife Betty, and Maud Mockridge, a novelist represented by the family publishing company. Gordon is also a director in the family business, as was Robert’s brother Martin who, at the beginning of the play, has apparently shot himself a year earlier. Through a series of revelations, instigated by a casual remark about the origins of a cigarette box, the truth behind Martin’s demise is laid bare.
Martin Caplan never appears on the stage and is only revealed to the audience through the prism of the memories of the other characters in the play. It transpires that he has held a particular fascination for several members of the family. Freda confesses that she was secretly in love with him in the time leading up to her marriage to Robert. Gordon, whose marriage to Betty appears to have been a cover for his homosexuality, also reveals that he was in love with Martin and would be prepared to do anything for him.
The Mephistophelian powers apparent in Martin are also evident in the character of Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head. Antonia falls under Palmer’s spell and leaves her husband Martin in consequence. Georgie, Martin’s mistress, also falls for Palmer and ultimately elopes with him. Both Martin and Palmer seem to contain almost unnatural powers of attraction. In Dangerous Corner, Olwen says of Martin, “He seemed to think that everybody young, male or female ought to be falling in love with him. He saw himself as a sort of Pan, you know”, to which Freda responds, “Yes, he did. And he’d every reason to.” Similarly, in A Severed Head, Palmer is described by Martin Lynch-Gibbon – “He’s a magician, and that can inspire dislike. But he’s warm-blooded. He needs love, just like anybody else.”
The Mephistophelian figure is a familiar trope in the works of Murdoch, the character who is seemingly irresistible to other characters. Mischa Fox is the eponymous enchanter in The Flight From the Enchanter, and Julius King (A Fairly Honourable Defeat) and Charles Arrowby (The Sea, The Sea) also fall into this category. The most striking comparison between Dangerous Corner and A Severed Head lies in the complexity of relationships between the characters. While this is used for melodramatic effect in the former, it is instrumental in the black comedy evident in the latter.
In Dangerous Corner, while Robert is married to Freda, he confesses to an unspoken and unrequited passion for Gordon’s wife Betty. Betty, meanwhile, all too aware of her husband’s homosexuality, has sought sexual release with Robert’s business partner Charles. Freda and Martin are both in thrall to Martin, although both are ultimately doomed to disappointment. The revelations fall quickly one after another until Olwen reveals the truth of Martin’s death. Far from committing suicide, Olwen has accidentally shot him after he attempts to rape her in a drug-induced frenzy.
Comparably in A Severed Head, Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s wife Antonia has fallen in love with her psychoanalyst, Palmer Anderson. Martin himself is in love with his mistress Georgie Hands, but Georgie will ultimately form a relationship with Palmer, Antonia will fall in love with Martin’s brother Alexander Lynch-Gibbon, and Martin will fall in love with Palmer’s sister Honor Klein. In comparison to Dangerous Corner, where the revelations of infidelity cause irreparable fractures in the relationship dynamics, the characters in A Severed Head deal with the merry-go-round of relationships with relative equanimity. That said, there are moments of violence, including an attempted suicide in the play, demonstrating that Murdoch’s comedic tone was often of a very dark hue.
The similarities between these two plays seem too apparent – an all-powerful male figure who can seemingly attract others at will, the complexity of duplicitous infidelities, sibling rivalry, violence and suicide. And while their narrative journeys are starkly different, it is hard not to think that this may have been a contributory factor in Priestley’s willingness to assist Murdoch in patching up her play.
Of course, any assumptions around Priestley’s motives for agreeing to assist with the adaptation of A Severed Head are purely speculative. It would seem, however, that despite the differences between the plots and the tone of these respective plays, there are thematic similarities which might have made Murdoch’s novel an enticing proposition for adaptation to him. Regardless of the reasons, the alliance between these two great authors proved immensely fruitful to them both. While Murdoch’s career as a playwright was limited, she did at least have this one triumph in the West End and established a lasting friendship with Priestley.