20 NOVEMBER 1964, Page 19

Flib -Flab

In White America. (New Arts.)—He Who Gets Slapped. (Hampstead Theatre Club.) THE theatrical objections to In White America are simple. It is an imitation of a television documentary and it has all the faults of a television documentary at its worst ; superficiality, failure to follow up a sub- ject the moment it's become interesting and the interjection of comments which if not amplified sound only prim. Its about the American Negro --from the start till now. There's a narrator who, to give the authentic television touch, occasionally announces into a microphone on a table that we've jumped from, say, 1866 to 1907. There's also a screen on to which float from time to time (flash would be too strong) pictures of the Ameri- can Negro. Scarcely once are these used to pro- vide a satirical or acid contrast to the documents or even specially to underline them. From the Wealth of documentary evidence easily available, it is a thoroughly disappointing collection.

All of which would be insulting enough, but In White America is also insufferably patronising. It would be easier to explain how if one could be clear what it-is setting out to do, but part of the trouble arises from this very technique of aping television. There is the white commentator who next week no doubt will be dealing with abortion, • and the week after female alcoholics, sitting snugly just watching the people talk. Nowhere is there evidence of any attempt to give the compilation any sense of direction other than to achieve the vague and even comfortable feeling of, 'My, what a terrible problem, and it's not just Birmingham. Alabama, either. . .' It's just before the end and immediately after a heartbreaking account of a fifteen-year-old girl trying to get into a white school at Little Rock, that someone comments : after 400 years of barbaric treatment the Ameri-

can Negro is fed up with the unmitigated cruelty of the American white man.

Just that. Admittedly it turns out on reference to the programme to be a letter to Newsweek. One had thought it was the piece's conclusion.

One of the particular objects of In White America's patronising scorn is the white moder- ate. On this evidence though I'd guess that the people behind it are the biggest and flabbiest bunch of white moderates you ever met even if they're black. If I were an American Negro, it is exactly, the sort of thing that would drive me straight to the arms of Malcolm X. It is all the sadder because the whole of the cast is talented, and moving whenever it has the chance.

The atmosphere of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped at the Hampstead Theatre Club is as claustrophobic as that of the theatre's tiny foyer on a ,busy night. The reason is neither the huge circus set nor the extra large cast. Partly it's the play, always threatening to be so much better than it is: mainly it's the towering per- formance of Vladek Sheybal as He, which makes one want to drag him straight to the biggest theatre in the West End, put him on show, walk round him, listen to him again and again, and take every single one of one's friends. The simplest word to describe acting of this kind, and the highest tribute, is to say that it is humane. And Mr. Sheybal's performance is such that he takes the rest of an uneven east along with him.

MALCOLM RUTI IERFORD