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WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
The Fever Syndrome
Great acting and arresting ideas are marred by an over-written effort that risks blinding us with facts, says MARY CONWAY
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 Fever Syndrome
Hampstead Theatre
April 5 2022
IT’S a pity that a play with so many arresting ideas and such relevance to the modern world should find itself mired in excessive detail and dead-end arguments. Sadly, this is the case with Hampstead Theatre’s premiere of Alexis Zegerman’s latest offering.
Not that the ingredients for a first-rate drama aren’t there. Professor Richard Miles, played by the inimitable Robert Lindsay, is a renowned IVF maestro who has provided thousands of desperate men and women with babies they could not otherwise have borne. Richard is about to receive a lifetime achievement award second only to the Nobel Prize and, in the eyes of the public, is an undoubted luminary. His family have gathered for the presentation event, and all should be ripe for celebration except…
…the professor is deep in the clutches of Parkinson’s disease; his family of assorted offspring and others are more diverted by their battle with the unpalatable realities of life than with his glory; meanwhile his granddaughter, Lily, carries a genetic malfunction that is the fever syndrome of the play’s title.
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