It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.

For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, there are many risks to doing something that we might all take for granted: telling stories about our lives. These risks include censorship, blacklisting, imprisonment, and worse. But when the authorities forbid critical examinations of such topics as sexual orientation, alcoholism, suicide and politics, the Free Theatre responds by injecting these taboos into underground performances.

I hadn’t heard the term “cultural cringe” until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn’t occurred to me to doubt the cultural confidence and energy of the nation that gave us Patrick White and Peter Carey, Baz Luhrmann and Brett Whiteley, Joan Sutherland and Robert Hughes. But once I did, the phrase was everywhere. Google it and you’ll find hundreds of recent articles all devoted to the same basic premise: when it comes to culture, Europe is just better than Australia.

When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.

We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is ending as it began, with a production of The Seagull.

Shall I let you into a secret? Barrie Rutter isn’t always right. I’ve enjoyed a creative and rewarding professional relationship and personal friendship with Barrie for almost 20 years now, and I think I can say that without fear of him falling out with me. He isn’t always right – but he often is, and one of the things he’s right about is that a tragedy isn’t a tragedy until it’s a tragedy.

Sydney has a nervous tic. People think Australians are brash and bolshy but that's not true. There's a deep sense of ingrained anxiety here. That anxiety comes from being at the edge of the world, a long way from Europe and in an unfamiliar and unrelenting land. It has been expressed through the art of Australia for 200 years. Today the country and its biggest city are both more confident, so the anxiety expresses itself in subtler ways.

The transfer this week to the West End of The Weir has reminded theatre-goers of Conor McPherson’s hypnotic powers as a dramatist. In the Donmar's revival of the play you can palpably feel the playwright’s storytelling magic casting its spell all over again as, on a windy evening in a rural Irish pub, character after character unburdens himself - and finally herself - of a supernatural tale.

The fledgling career of Michael Codron, who has been knighted in the New Year's Honours list at the age of 75, might have ended almost as soon as it began. He embarked on a career as a solo impresario in 1956 and had staged three shows, none of which prospered. Then he went to Cambridge and saw a promising undergraduate revue, written by Bamber Gascoigne. He decided to bring the improbably titled Share My Lettuce to London, recasting it with Kenneth Williams and the then unknown Maggie Smith.

We at The Arts Desk are as fond as the next person of swans-a-swimming, partridges and pear-trees, not to mention gold rings, but be honest: 'tis already the season to be jolly sick and tired of all those knee-jerk compilations of Slade, sleighbells and Celine Dion's "O Holy Night". Without wishing to audition for the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s time to admit that not everything made in the name of Christmas is of the highest artistic merit. But, it turns out, there’s gold in them there hills – snow-capp'd, natch.