Seen and heard: April 2016

Brave – Pixar film from 2012, watched off TV recording. The usual Pixar quality of animation, with great acting and pretty good gags, but something not quite right about the whole conception: it’s a story about adolescent relationship with parents, but adolescents are the last people who will want to watch a film like this, so who’s it for? Not one for the trophy cabinet.

The Durrells – surprisingly good and funny rendition of this bonkers bohemian family (middle-aged single mother and children respectively obsessed by animals, romance, guns and becoming a famous writer) in pre-tourist post-War Corfu, wisely (unlike the 1980s dramatization) taking the focus off the future naturalist Gerald.

Party political broadcast by the Green Party – definitely the funniest party political broadcast ever aired, with nursery-age children taking on the roles of mainstream party politicians: not just as a single joke, but worked out over a full five minutes.

The Jane Austen Book Club – interesting romcom with various unsatisfied women (and one man) forming a book club to (re-)read one Jane Austen novel a month. The running gag is the way their lives keep echoing tropes from the books, and if there’s a message I guess it’s about novels – Jane Austen novels in particular – as a route to emotional literacy, at least for men, if you can get them to read them.

Na zdrowie, from The Delayed Flute by Annette Ziegenmeyer – astonishing piece for solo recorder, written for the melodic line to be fed back with a half-second delay. Young Polly Bartlett played this in the Woodwind finals of BBC Young Musician, and though she didn’t win I thought her performance was better than the original recording by Ziegenmeyer herself.

Shakespeare Live at the RSC – very mixed bardfest celebrating Shakespeare 400, which started with a very ropey song and dance number from West Side Story but eventually delivered some tremendous items, including a hilarious sketch in which various famous actors argue about the right way to deliver Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy, worth the licence fee on its own.

Hilma af Klint at The Serpentine Gallery – interesting rather than moving exhibition of works by this long-unknown artist, who is now celebrated for having invented abstract painting before the abstract painters. One of a group of Swedish women artists in the 1880s who used spiritualist techniques to channel the teaching of spirits (like Theosophists, though she herself was associated with Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy), most of her mainly monochrome drawings look to me like efforts to communicate the spiritual teachings she received. There are a lot of geometrical shapes, symbolic figures (male and female, snail shells, black and white swans), and writing of words or letters of apparent esoteric significance (such as the often repeated W U). I found them about as exciting as management diagrams. Much more powerful, to my mind, were the large colour and more purely abstract pieces: the ones they used in the exhibition publicity. Just as bonkers, no doubt, but trying to communicate less and hence, I think, actually saying more.

Photo credit. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen Installation view Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 15 May 2016), Image © Jerry Hardman-Jones