WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Shock tactics fail to generate empathy
SIMON PARSONS recommends a thought-provoking play about the long-term impact of traumatic childhoods and the morality of accepting the rehabilitation of social outcasts
POWERFUL ACTING: Abigail Hood as Kayleigh Grey and Emma Keele as Rebecca Hastie
[Ben Wilkin] 
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
Monster
Park Theatre
ABIGAIL HOOD’S well-constructed naturalistic drama opens with two teenage Glaswegian girls hanging out, flirting and fantasising after school on a patch of wasteland, symbolic of their lives.
The Monster, played by Hood, is Kayleigh — a bright, bitter and damaged youngster whose home life with an abusive mother on the game is a living nightmare.
When her girlfriend finally deserts her for a boy, her instinctive response is an appalling act of violence towards the only adult who has paid her any attention.
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