Farce – with its panic-propelled exits and entrances – should not work in the round. But at the Orange Tree, which has a rich festive tradition of staging the works of Feydeau, they make mincemeat of that notion.

As a parent, particularly of little girls, one can grow sick of the saccharine world of princesses and fairies. What a relief, then, to see Mike Kenny's Sleeping Beauty, which runs in multi-coloured glory alongside West Yorkshire Playhouse's main house offering, The Wind in the Willows. Natasha Magigi joyously defies the picture-book stereotype of the slumbering princess and makes the production all the richer for doing so.

Four years ago, Nick Payne was working in the National Theatre's bookshop; now, with his play Constellations winning prizes and acclaim in the West End, he's one of the most in-demand talents around. Next stop Hollywood, he tells Matilda Battersby.

A new season explores the highs of solo performance

The next generation is standing in the wings, ready to take the arts and entertainment world by storm. Here, our critics pick the brightest talent in everything from comedy and film to theatre and books, and say why they think they're the real deal

Kraftwerk at the Tate, an Alan Partridge film, Danny Boyle back behind the camera... Can the arts events of 2013 live up to this year's Olympian efforts? Radar's critics certainly think so

Class act

Ian Brown comes within a mole's whisker of matching last Christmas's feelgood revival of Annie with his Wind in the Willows, which faithfully evokes a kinder, gentler world where financiers wrote wistful tales of riparian japes as opposed to trading unfathomable credit derivatives and bankrupting whole continents.

Grandage lures them in with a riotous return to an old hit

'Fuerzabruta' is back and the antics are edgier, louder and messier than ever, says Paul Bignell

The Royal Shakespeare Company is the natural home for Pushkin's great drama, with its echoes of Macbeth and the history plays, and its policy of commenting on the political turmoil of its own era, the 1820s, through a depiction of the unrest in an earlier period – Moscow at the cusp of the 17th century.