WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Gore-filled Jacobean tragedy is a bloody mess
Gore fest: The Duchess of Malfi
[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
The Duchess Of Malfi
The Swan Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
MARIA ABERG’S 2014 production of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil demonstrated that she is at home with that writer’s blood-soaked, nightmare world. There is certainly no shortage of blood in her treatment of Webster’s great companion piece The Duchess of Malfi.
The final scenes involve the cast wading around and rolling in a lake of blood to such an extent that many in the audience must have worried about the RSC laundry bills.
Whereas her earlier production reminded us of an Italianate US gangster fiefdom, this slimmed-down version of Webster’s other major tragedy has no sense of any social context in which the inane cruelties take place.
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