Arts: Cries & Whispers in America

IT'S A hot sunny afternoon in Washington DC and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is full. The 2,000 tickets released by the box-office each morning (there's no charge) have all gone. Only a visit to the press office gets me in. The museum opened a year ago last week, and already two million people have visited it.

On the concourse schoolkids in sneakers, shorts and baseball caps muck about, unsombrely, striking a strange note. So do the usual museum facilities: the cafe, the bookshop, the discounts for members. 'This is a conceptual museum,' a guide tells some teenagers. 'We want you to experience their lives as people not as victims.' An usher tears our tickets and instructs each of us to pick up a card. It tells the story of a Holocaust person. My card is about Isaac Sandler, born c 1894 in the Ukraine, killed in 1941 by a fellow Soviet under orders from a German commander. In the lift the usher wishes us 'a meaningful time'. There seems another way in which this experience could be dreadful: if it becomes a Disney one.

It doesn't. The exhibition covers three floors (they recommend three to four hours) and contains a mass of footage, photos, interviews and artefacts. You walk down a carriage of a freight train used for deportation, past heaps of shoes confiscated from prisoners at Majdanek, past the scale model of Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which had 15 ovens. The book that accompanies the exhibition, The World Must Know, says this 'is no ordinary exhibition. Its opening cannot be a celebration, nor its catalogue self-regarding'.

The book doesn't mention Oskar Schindler. At first, he wasn't in the exhibition either, but now there's a little display about him on one wall, which seems about right even to one who admires Spielberg's handling of his story. One reason Spielberg made his film is that a survey showed that six young Americans in 10 did not know what the Holocaust was. Now, more of them do. I wondered if the film had had an effect on the museum's admissions. It opened in the US on 31 December, and it turns out that museum attendances dipped in January and February. This may have had more to do with the cold winter than with Spielberg.

On the way out there's a visitors' book. One entry says: 'My grandparents died in Treblinka.' Another says: 'Really neat-o'

WHEN in Rome, and all that, so I went to Four Weddings and a Funeral, the hit British film, set in the world I've come here to get away from. I saw it on New York's Lower East Side, where Anglophilia is by no means rampant. The cinema shook with laughter. The idea that this movie is No 1 across America - well, it gives you a new respect for Hicksville, USA. The film also produced the quote of the week. USA Today, noting that the poetry-reading in the funeral scene was having an effect in the bookshops, confides: 'Poet W H Auden is hot, hot, hot.'

THE BRITISH are coming on Broadway too. Diana Rigg's Medea is here, and the National's Carousel, and now the National's An Inspector Calls is being heavily advertised. The ads are selling it as JB PRIESTLEY'S THRILLER. This is like calling Schindler's List a story with a happy ending: not untrue, but highly misleading. An Inspector Calls has elements of suspense but it's really social comment, a tilt at the unthinking rich. This may not be what the average American theatregoer wants to see. Stephen Daldry's production has been rightly acclaimed for its daring. Shame it doesn't dare to be honest about itself.