Theater: Love in the Mind’s Eye

A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley, plays a game of musical beds with three men and three women, but it is not about sex. It is a witty, ironic, urbane, satiric, unsettling, elusive, philosophical comedy about the nature of reality.

A British wine merchant, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, comes home from his mistress, Georgie, one late afternoon to be told by his wife that she wants a divorce. Antonia knows nothing of Georgie, but she has fallen in love with her American psychoanalyst, Palmer Anderson. Far from abandoning Martin, Antonia and Palmer demand his love, and they are quite shattered to learn of his mistress. One of the more richly comic scenes in the play is that of Martin apologizing to Antonia and Palmer for Georgie.

In short order, Martin develops a tingling interest in Palmer’s half sister Honor Klein, an eerie anthropologist given to such parlor tricks as decapitating a kabuki doll with one swish of a samurai sword. Even more unnervingly, she turns out to be sleeping with her half brother. By this time, Georgie has taken up with Martin’s brother, a sculptor. The final curtain finds Palmer with Georgie, Antonia with the sculptor, and Martin with Honor Klein.

As sheer bed-living room farce, A Severed Head is manipulated cleverly and performed with skill. Heather Chasen as Antonia cat-licks laughs off her lines, and Paul Eddington as the pietistic psychoanalyst arcs his body in gestures of helpfulness, as if he were physically proffering mental health. As the anthropologist, Sheila Burrell looks like a shrunken head that has been restored to lifesize, and Robin Bailey’s Martin, while a trifle actorish, is very much the passive modern vacuum-hero into whose life trouble rushes.

But the surface of this play is its shadow, and its substance is shadowed in moral and mythical ambiguity.

Miss Murdoch, from whose novel A Severed Head is adapted, does not moralize. The point of her characters’ behavior is its pointlessness. The only place sleeping around gets them is into bed. Breaking all the rules merely traps them in the bondage of incessant repetition. This is inherent in their own natures. Martin, for example, is submissive to his wife, who is an older woman, a child-to-parent relationship, and protective to his mistress, who is about 20 years younger, a father-to-daughter relationship. At play’s end he is repeating his submissive role to an even more aggressive personality, Honor Klein.

On the mythic level, the play is more opaque. Two characters seem more like gods than people, gods of the modern mind. Palmer, the psychoanalyst, is the contemporary god of reason, restoring order amid emotional chaos. Honor Klein, the anthropologist, is the primordial goddess of instinct, violence, and what D. H. Lawrence called “the blood consciousness.” These occult beings appear in rooms whose doors have not been opened, but a more tangible proof of godhood is their incestuous relationship, which sets them apart from the others and constitutes normal behavior only among gods. By making Honor the more powerful of the two, Miss Murdoch seems to attest the primacy of blood over brain. As for the syrnbolism of the severed head, it may signify the neurotic tyranny of intellect over instinct, or it may denote the divorce of mind and body that has split modern man’s psyche.

A Severed Head is a complex entertainment of a sort that Broadway is seldom lucky enough to get. If it fails to find an audience, it will be a judgment on New York theatergoers and not on a most sophisticated play.