This week sees the return of the ever-versatile Canadian theatre-maker Robert LePage to the Barbican with Blue Dragon, a sequel of sorts to his breakthrough work of the 1980s, The Dragons’ Trilogy.

Elsewhere in London the Royal Court is kicking off their International Playwrights Season with Lyndsey Turner’s production of Pedro Miguel Rozo’s Our Private Life, a black comedy set in modern Colombia. The season will continue in March with Aleksey Scherbak’s Remeberance Day and will also consist of a number of seminars and readings of Eastern European and Latin American plays.

In Notting Hill, Lucy Bailey and Anda Winter’s new venue the Print Room stages its second production (following Pasolini’s Fabrication) with Bailey’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s sinister Snake in the Grass.  Staying in west London, JMK Award-winning young director Caroline Steinbeis stages Tom Holloway’s new play Fatherland at the Gate Theatre.

Hampstead Theatre will play host to the Druid Theatre production of Enda Walsh’s Penelope, a reworking of the story of Penelope and her multiple suitors from Homer’s Odyssey, that is, shall we say, very Enda Walsh. The tiny but  reliable Union Theatre are staging Darren Murphy’s Irish Blood, English Heart and Battersea’s Theatre 503 have a production of Sharon Clark’s new play about race, politicisation and the 80s, The Biting Point.

On Valentine’s Day, rather aptly, Terry Saunders’ bittersweet exercise in storytelling and animation, Six and Half Loves, will play at the Pleasance. On a similar note Literary Death Match returns to London’s Shoreditch House  on the 16th February with a ‘Love Hurts’ evening. Rowland Rivron is one of the judges, but don’t hold that against them.