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THEATRE

STEPHEN WIGHT

Wight attracted attention at the end of 2006, getting excellent reviews for his playing of Stan, the modern counterpart of Leporello, in Patrick Marber’s updating of Molière’s Don Juan, Don Juan in Soho. He was an earthy sidekick for Rhys Ifans’s libertine. But it was his acting of Mugsy in an original Marber play, Dealer’s Choice, that revealed him to be a comic actor of the first rank, winning the Evening Standard award for the most promising newcomer of 2007.

Mugsy is a waiter who always takes part in the poker school at the restaurant where he works and always comes out badly. Wight brought an amiable idiocy to a character whose ambition is to win enough to open his own eaterie in a converted gents’ toilet in Mile End Road in London, but he achieved more than that. There was something touching about his dogged belief that one day he’d be successful, though it’s obvious that he’s not called Mugsy for nothing.

“I’ve risen from the ashes like the proverbial dodo,” Mugsy says. It takes a skilful comic actor to time such lines to get more than the expected amount of laughter – but more than a skilful comic actor to leave you sympathising with that character’s hopeless hopes. It’s clear that Wight has a fine future.

BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

COMEDY

SHARON HORGAN

After hovering on the periphery of comedy-lovers’ vision for a few years, Horgan has spent the past 18 months going from supporting player to star turn. In fact, if you want to know the definition of “breakthrough”, look no farther. After grabbing attention as Rob Brydon’s celebrity booker in his showbiz spoof Annually Retentive in 2006, Horgan took the bull by the horns. She co-wrote (with Dennis Kelly) and starred in the cynical BBC Three sitcom Pulling. She co-wrote and starred in the brilliantly black Channel Five sitcom Angelo’s. Both shows exceeded expectations enough to get Horgan some serious attention.

Like most overnight successes, Horgan’s breakthrough has been a long time coming. After spending most of her twenties in a Dublin job centre, she moved to London at 27 to study English and start writing scripts. Now 37, she’s unabashedly ambitious: “I’m in a bit of a hurry, you know?”

In her writing and performing, Horgan is quick-witted, quirky, clear-eyed and unsentimental. She doesn’t do nice. She doesn’t need to. She’s a fresh voice, with the confidence to bring comedy to new areas. “Real pain makes comedy funnier,” she says. And Horgan can be very painful indeed.

DOMINIC MAXWELL

TV DRAMA

TOM HARDY

There is enough mediocrity pervading small-screen drama to make any fearless, risk-taking young actor really stand out. But to say simply that Tom Hardy has stood out in the past year would seem an understatement. His appearances have been revelatory. Take his series-stealing turn as a psychotic handyman in Channel 4’s Cape Wrath, or his extraordinary portrayal of a homeless “sociopathic street raconteur” in Stuart: A Life Backwards, or the menace that he brought to his Bill Sikes in the recent Oliver Twist. The 30-year-old Hardy is no stranger to acclaim. The stage side of his CV includes a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for most promising newcomer (in 2004) and an Evening Standard award for outstanding newcomer in 2003; his film roles, meanwhile, have included a blue-veined alien in Star Trek: Nemesis.

But his talent has stuttered, not helped by dabblings with a drug habit. While his rehabilitation has brought a renewed focus (next up: Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla and The Code, opposite Morgan Freeman), he retains that edge of chaos that always makes for the most compelling screen presences. Who wants safe and predictable from their actors anyway?

JAMES JACKSON

OPERA

LUCY CROWE

Some sopranos get by on vocal riches alone – the golden gloriousness of a fine legato or the soda-stream bubbles of a flawless coloratura. But others go farther, binding vocal security with dramatic commitment. And few young artists do that as well as the exceptional soprano Crowe, 29, for whom 2007 was a talismanic year.

The two biggest cheers went to Crowe for her appearances with English National Opera. The Times called her saucy Poppea in Handel’s Agrippina a revelation, praising not only her “luscious tone and classy phrasing”, but “the acting skills to turn history’s greatest tart into a rounded, funny, Meg Ryanish kookie”. Then she stole the limelight in the autumn at the Coliseum as an airheaded Drusilla in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. And that’s not mentioning the charm and sweetness of her Elisa in Mozart’s Il re pastore at Garsington Opera in the summer – all of which proves that Crowe can take whatever is thrown at her.

Opera is changing in the 21st century. It is becoming a truly integrated musical, visual and dramatic experience. Crowe’s artistry epitomises the genre’s transformation – so vote for her, and join the revolution.

NEIL FISHER

DANCE

JAMES FORBAT James Forbat is 21 years old, and although still a member of the corps de ballet he has broken through the usual anonymity of that position. Since joining English National Ballet two years ago, he has caught the eye of two of Britain’s leading choreographers. He created roles in William Tuckett’s The Canterville Ghost (playing Mr Otis) and in Michael Corder’s The Snow Queen (in which he was an especially charismatic Wolf). Forbat has made his mark not by being flashy, but by being more thoughtfully dramatic on stage.

He was born in Redhill, Surrey, and trained at the Royal Ballet School. When he graduated in 2005 he had two job offers, one with Dutch National Ballet and one with ENB. He chose the latter, and is well aware of the responsibility that comes with being an English dancer working at home.

He admits to flying the flag for Britain in an art form so dominated by foreign talent that home-grown dancers often feel overshadowed. “It’s really important that the best dancers have the top jobs,” Forbat says. “And if English dancers aren’t good enough – well, tough luck. But I would like to think that I’m good enough to be able to show something for England.”

DEBRA CRAINE

POP

BISHI

There can’t be many sitar-wielding pop stars out there. Especially not ones that have a degree in postcolonial studies, describe their style as “Bertie Bassett meets Josephine Baker” and name-drop Jarvis Cocker. But Bishi, 24, is a truly idiosyncratic pop prospect.

Born in West London to a Bengali family and expected to “go to university and marry a doctor”, she instead sought a far more colourful education. At 14 she met the club promoter Matthew Glamorre and together they set up Siren Suite, “Britain’s only classical/new music club”, which brought Bach to the dancefloor. Their next venture was the flamboyant Kash Point, where she could be found DJing dressed only in beach balls. Clubland couldn’t hold this Hoxton Saraswati for ever and she left to study sitar at the Ravi Shankar Institute.

Her debut album, Nights at the Circus, was released last year. Named after Angela Carter’s novel, it shares the book’s transgressive and acrobatic gusto. Mixing up powerpop with tablas and sitars, euphoric vocal harmonies weave spells, while songs about night buses remind you that Bishi’s music is rooted in contemporary London. She calls it “new psychedelia”. We call it brilliant.

PHOEBE GREENWOOD

LITERATURE

RICHARD MILWARD

Richard Milward’s Apples was the most shocking, exhilarating debut novel published in 2007. Throwing open a window on to the murky lives of teenagers growing up on a housing estate in Middlesbrough, it has been decribed as “Catcher in the Rye meets Arctic Monkeys”. That’s an accurate tag: Milward mixes Holden Caulfield’s anger with Alex Turner’s wit and grit.

Apples is narrated alternately by obsessive-compulsive Adam and wild child Eve, who navigate punch-ups in car parks, pills in nightclub toilets, drunken rape at house parties and hoodies and headaches at school. But this is no misery tour. The optimism of youth leaks through in Milward’s wide-eyed prose, with its “shiny bitter silver” mornings.

Milward, 23, grew up in Middlesbrough. He printed his Trainspotter-esque first book, In Dust, aged 16, himself. At 19 he wrote Apples; Faber was making eager overtures within a month of receiving it. Now studying fine art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London, Milward is planning a second novel, also set in his home town.

Youth often attracts hype, but Milward’s writing can stick up for itself – hopefully there is plenty more of it to come.

TOM GATTI

VISUAL ART

TESSA FARMER

Remember the secret world of the child? Remember the fascination and fantasy, the intensity of focus and the ferocity of feeling? This is the place that Tessa Farmer tries to take you back to. She leads you past the polished surfaces of mundane perception into miniature realms that normally might not have been noticed. Her tiny scenarios of scuttling creatures awaken a childlike curiosity.

You peer through the apertures that she opens in the imagination. But don’t expect to discover some lost Eden. Farmer’s microscopic creatures, intricately crafted from filaments of tree root and fragments of dead insects, are macabre hybrids. They indulge in all sorts of perverse antics. Behind the surfaces of natural beauty lies a savage Boschian world.

Farmer creates a reflection in miniature of our society. She shows us its fragility and its ferocity, its poetry and its repulsion, its beauty and its brutality. Damien Hirst did something like this with his dead animals. But if Hirst is Francis Bacon in 3-D then Farmer is probably Albrecht Dürer. The same intense scrutiny seems to underlie the fantasies played out by her tiny desiccated insects. The drama lies in the detail of these miniature works.

RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON

CLASSICAL

JENNIFER PIKE

The burnout rate among child prodigies in the classical music world is alarmingly high. But Jennifer Pike seems to have reached the safe haven of adulthood (she’s 18) with no traumas and her reputation not only intact but soaring by the year. She first had a fiddle thrust into her hands at 5, and was educated at one of the country’s “hothouses” for young musicians – Chetham’s School in Manchester, where her dad is head of composition. In 2002, at the alarmingly precocious age of 12, she became the youngest winner of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition.

But she and her parents were wise enough to let her public exposure grow slowly; she waited until after her 16th birthday, for instance, to play her first solo recital at Wigmore Hall. Now she’s a wonderfully assured musician, capable of tackling the most challenging concertos with technical brilliance, yet also of producing subtle variations of timbre and phrasing. Only time will tell if she has the stamina, the soul, the desire and the intellectual curiosity to develop into a world-class performer who can sustain a long career. But this composed young woman is already mesmerisingly good.

RICHARD MORRISON

FILM

SAM RILEY

Anton Corbijn’s film Control, about the miserable life of Ian Curtis, features the most startling film debut I’ve seen. Sam Riley is magnificent as the lead singer of Joy Division, who died at the age of 23 by hanging himself from a clothes airer suspended from his kitchen ceiling. His reasons for doing this still haunt the friends and family he left behind. Sam Riley plays the punk-rock poet with the passion of a council-house Hamlet. He charms you with his big brown eyes and mysterious tears.

Curtis grew up on a bleak estate in the 1970s, and was intimate with prejudice and poverty. Music is anger management for the aspiring singer. Corbijn’s concert footage of Riley, 27, fronting the original Joy Division anthems is electric. The actor leans into the microphone as if his life depended on it. His shirts are soaked with sweat. His spastic robotic dances are mesmerising.

Part of Curtis’s tragedy was his epilepsy. Riley’s frightening fits on stage make you feel shocked and helpless. But the sheer intensity of his performance is alarming. So too the bouts of depression. “Cheer up,” says his rude and hairy road manager, a sublime comic turn by Toby Kebble. “You’re not the lead singer of the Fall.” I’m not sure Curtis saw the joke.

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

How to vote for your favourite nominee

To vote go to timesonline.co.uk/breakthrough and click on the name of your chosen nominee. Voters are registered and can vote only once. Voting closes at midnight on Wednesday, January 16. The South Bank Show Awards will be televised on ITV1 on Sunday, February 3.