WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
A brilliantly tense play
A compelling story of how cruelty begets cruelty, and of how the child becomes the parent, writes PETER MASON
Orla Fitzgerald as Maureen and Adam Best as Pato
[Helen Maybanks] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Beauty Queen of Leenane
Lyric Hammersmith, London
SET in the west of Ireland and first staged in 1996, Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane centres around 40-year-old Maureen, angry and depressed at having to look after her manipulative, ailing mother as the rain falls ceaselessly outside their run-down home in Connemara.
Momentarily Maureen’s drab isolation is relieved as she stumbles into a night of awkward romance with neighbour Pato, who has returned briefly from a labouring job in England.
But when her selfish mother contrives to put the kybosh on their putative relationship, there are bitter consequences all round.
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