WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Venice Preserved, Swan Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
The conflict between love and honour in Thomas Otway’s Restoration tragedy gets a modish yet uneven update by the RSC
Patriarch: Les Denis as Priuli
[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
IF THE RSC was seeking to complement its current production of Vanbrugh’s popular Restoration comedy The Provoked Wife with a tragedy of the period, they would have relatively little choice.
Thomas Otway’s 1682 play Venice Preserved has been virtually the only Restoration tragedy to maintain its stage popularity since its own time.
Although the play shares the genre’s characteristic mixture of rhetorical heroic language and thematic conflicts between love and honour — straining the patience of audiences in our more prosaic age — its subject of the plotting to overthrow a repressive regime has a more familiar ring.
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