A Severed Head is perhaps Murdoch’s most successful foray into the world of theatre. She co-wrote the script for A Severed Head with the playwright and novelist JB Priestley. 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.
Murdoch’s great love of the Flaying of Marsyas ignited Phillips’ inspiration. ‘When the National Portrait Gallery commissioned me to paint her portrait I recalled our conversation’, he said, and he ‘started a fairly hasty copy of the picture to act as a backdrop so that she might sit in front of the head of Marsyas.’ Phillips sketched in the Titian with broad brushstrokes; in contrast, he rendered the image of Murdoch herself with great precision and imbued it with a translucent, otherworldly light