Chris BrownInterviewChris Brown: 'It was the biggest wake-up call'Decca AitkenheadHe was a teen superstar, the unassailable crown prince of R&B – until he assaulted his girlfriend Rihanna. Chris Brown talks about 'that incident', his year in anger management and why he's got a lot more music (and money) to makePeople who hate Chris Brown – and there are many – might sum him up as the bad boy of R&B, chiefly famous for beating up Rihanna.

TheatreReviewVaudeville, London Robert Askins’s Broadway hit about a Bible belt teenager in thrall to a foul-mouthed puppet is merely crude American religious fervour inevitably breeds a reaction. Although Robert Askins’s play has made a five-year journey from the theatrical margins to Broadway hit, it strikes me as a coarse, crude satire that – not unlike The Book of Mormon – greets one form of excess with another. Sock it to Satan: the barman behind profane puppet drama Hand to GodRead moreThe play is set in a world Askins knows, as it were, at first hand: that of a Lutheran ministry in Texas, where sock puppets are used as a way of spreading the gospel.

TheatreReviewWyndham’s theatre, London At two hours with no interval, the actor-director’s production hurtles past at such speed that the depths of the play are too rarely realised Kenneth Branagh has confirmed his mercurial ability to inhabit Shakespeare’s flawed heroes over decades on stage and film. We have come to expect great things: energy, polish and accomplished verse diction. That is what we get here, in his production of what some believe to be the most tragic of Shakespearean downfalls.

TheatreReviewRoyal & Derngate, Northampton Katori Hall’s astonishing drama, based on the alleged visions of three schoolgirls, explores the power of faith and miracles as Rwanda’s genocide looms Katori Hall’s astonishing play, dealing with the apparent visitation of the Virgin Mary to a trio of Rwandan schoolgirls in 1981, has some distinguished forebears. Like Shaw’s Saint Joan, it explores the nature of miracles, and, like Miller’s The Crucible, it raises the spectre of mass hallucination.

OpinionUS news This article is more than 15 years oldPreventing the rise of a 'messiah'This article is more than 15 years oldJonathan David FarleyThe US government's efforts to discredit Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders illustrate the lengths to which it will go to stifle left-wing movementsForty years ago today, a bullet severed the spine of a man whom many the world over thought of as a prince. We have all seen the picture of the hotel balcony where that prince stood, and fell, surrounded by his entourage, all pointing - presumably, in the direction from which the bullet came.