"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." * * * * * 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-- "Thou who so lightly dealest death to me Be thou then very sure of thine own soul;" and _Lisle's_ prayer-- "And judge me, Thou that sittest in Thy Heaven, 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. Perhaps 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-- "Her face was close to me, and dimmed the world." or _Lisle's_-- "Thou hast unlocked the loveliness of earth." 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.