Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3811/At the Play
"The Sin of David."
This is not, like the plays in which Joseph has recently figured, an adaptation from the Hebrew. Mr. Stephen Phillips has given a seventeenth-century (A.D.) setting to the Bathsheba motive, transplanting it from the polygamous East into the England of one-man-one-wife. His object, no doubt, was to emphasize one aspect of his borrowed theme, which is further enforced by his choice of milieu—the camp of the Puritans.
Lest this fairly obvious note of irony should escape us, Mr. Phillips accentuates it at the start by making his David (Sir Hubert Lisle, Commander of the Parliamentary Forces in the Fenland) condemn a young officer to be shot for a "carnal" offence. The delinquent's answer—
Be thou then very sure of thine own soul;"
and Lisle's prayer—
As I have shown no mercy, show me none!..
If ever a woman's beauty shall ensnare
My soul into such sin as he hath sinned"—
these passages, even if the title of the play had not prepared us, afford fair warning of the way in which things have got to go. In fact it is all very simple and straightforward, and (on the constructive side) Hellenic. Per-haps indeed the treatment is a little too direct, and the tragedy moves too quickly to its consummation (thirty or forty minutes suffice for the reading of it). It might serve its publisher (of the Bodley Head) as one of a series to be entitled: "Half-hours with the Best Sinners."
As a poem The Sin of David cannot compare for beauty with Paolo and Francesca, though it contains isolated lines which recall Mr. Phillips's earliest drama, such as the plea of Joyce, the condemned officer
or Lisle's—
But then, of course, the exotic manner would here have been an impropriety. This is not Rimini; it is the English Fenland; and all the characters, with the exception of Miriam Mardyke (the Bathsheba of the piece), who was bred in France and had its sun in her blood, were of the Puritan pattern that does not accommodate itself very easily to the language of passion.
But all this we knew ten years ago, when The Sin of David was first published; and the only new interest was the question of its adaptability to the theatre. Poetic drama seldom gains much by presentation on the stage, unless it is full of action; and there is little action in this play except of the inward kind. In almost the only case where quick movement is here demanded one becomes conscious of the intrusion of words. When he knows that the relief of Pomfret depends upon his instant action, Lisle still finds time for conversations with his servant, with Miriam and with the doctor, and for a couple of well-sustained soliloquies.
Mr. H. B. Irving (Sir Hubert Lisle). "Pomfret will fall in another two seconds if I don't ride over and raise the siege. Still, my first duty is to Mr. Stephen Phillips, and he wants me for a few dialogues and a brace of soliloquies before I start."
Certain lines, again, whose literary flavour, when read, makes us overlook their inherent improbability in the mouth of the character that utters them, take on, when spoken, an air of artifice. Such are the lines in which Miriam describes her old sister-in-law, to her face, as
And reputably rusting to the grave."
And there is always the danger that actors will be content with a rather slurred and perfunctory recitation of lines that have no bearing on the action but are just inserted for joy as a rhetorical embroidery.
It may be a trivial criticism, but I think the play suffered a little from the appearance of the love-child whose death was to be the punishment for Lisle's sin in sending Mardyke to his death in a forlorn hope. The instructions in my book are contradictory. The time of Act. III. is described as "five years later," and we are then told that "four years are supposed to have elapsed since Act II." Anyhow, the boy should be only three or four years old. Actually he is a girl (the stage must have it so) of some ten summers. You may say that all these years during which the lovers' passion has been purified by worship of the child's innocence, and "God has not said a word," add a dramatic force to the blow when at last it falls. But for myself—a mere matter of taste—I feel that the vengeance of Heaven has been nursed too long.
As for the interpretation, I must honestly compliment Mr. Irving and Miss Miriam Lewes on their performance. It is true that I should never have mistaken Mr. Irving for a fighting Roundhead, and he might well have sacrificed something of his personality for the sake of illusion. It is true, too, that he was more concerned about dramatic than poetic effects; yet, within the limitations of a very marked individuality, he did justice to the author by a performance that was most sincere and persuasive. Miss Lewes played her more difficult part with great charm and delicacy. Her manner, even under stress of passionate feeling, still kept the right restraint that Miriam had learnt from her environment; but always we were made to feel that under the prim Puritan gown was a body that had been "born in the sun's lap," and held the warmth of the vinelands in its veins. Perhaps it was from France, too, that Miriam had caught her strange habit of pronouncing "my" (a perfectly good word) as "me."
There is little so worth seeing on the stage to-day as The Sin of David, and I very sincerely hope that both the play and its interpreters may win the wide appreciation they have earned.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Arthur Eckerley's ingenious little farce, A Collection will be made, was only introduced into the bill at the Garrick two days before the withdrawal of the Duke of Killicrankie, and that, like the melancholy Jaques, it has had to share the ducal exile. I look forward to its early reappearance under happier auspices, and with Mr. Guy Newall again in the leading part.