Salle: King's Head Theatre, Islington, Londres

Ruddigore is a glorious comic romp through a very English country village, full of wonderfully awkward Edwardian love and delicious puns. Whatever your Valentine experience this year, you can't help but be swept up in it.

Winner of OperaUpClose’s Flourish competition for new writing, The Blank Canvas is a heartbreakingly tragic tale of an abstract artist coming to terms with widowhood, success and some worrying hallucinations. 

OperaUpClose have set their version of Verdi’s classic in the 1920s, with some beautiful period costumes and a few prettily observed production details It’s a big story on a very small scale.

Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso in two acts, L’elisir d’amore, is a light-hearted tale of love overcoming all obstacles, with the help of a little “love potion”.

The King’s Head Theatre in Islington is, as one might suspect from the name, in the back of a pub. Founded in 1970, it was the first pub theatre to open in London since Shakespeare’s time. Housed in a back room that used to contain a boxing ring, it is tiny: tightly packed seating for maybe 60 or 70 people and an unelevated stage, beginning where the seating stops.

For most of us, the word ‘experimental’ probably provokes images of brass instruments filled with washing-up liquid or electrically manipulated sneezing sounds. But experimental doesn’t have to mean mental: it can simply refer to something original, something done differently.

If you think that Hansel and Gretel is a gentle, happy piece of Christmas cheer, the first act of Lewis Reynolds's pub production for Open Door Opera might give you pause for thought. The children may be naughty, but they're genuinely starving, and the mother may be overbearingly harsh, but she is genuinely at her wits' end.

Music and politics combine to form a potent mix. Art in its exclusive pursuit, can arguably avoid making a political statement; but it can also shine a bitingly harsh light on political themes, thus bringing them close to home through personal acts of dramatisation. Manifest Destiny 2011 proudly does the latter.