Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt has its premiere in Oslo, with incidental music by Edvard Grieg

Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House signals a new direction in drama in its frank treatment of tensions within a marriage

Henrik Ibsen publishes his play Hedda Gabler, with its powerfully manipulative central character, a year before it is first produced (in Germany)

Thomas Hardy publishes his novel Tess of the Durbervilles, with a dramatic finale at Stonehenge

Oscar Wilde's comedy Lady Windermere's Fan is a great success with audiences in London's St. James Theatre

W.B. Yeats publishes a short play The Countess Cathleen, his first contribution to Irish poetic drama

Bernard Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses, deals with the serious social problem of slum landlords

Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck publishes his play Pelléas et Mélisande

Oscar Wilde's most brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest is performed in London's St. James Theatre

Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull has a disastrous premiere in St Petersburg (but is well received two years later in Moscow)

Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, succeeds at the Moscow Art Theatre

Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya is directed by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre

The play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, fosters Irish nationalism

Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre

Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, is staged by Stanislavsky just a few months before the author's death

J.M. Synge's play Riders to the Sea has its premiere at the Molesworth Hall in Dublin

J.M Barrie's play for children Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up has its premiere in London

Bernard Shaw has two new plays opening in London in the same year, Major Barbara and Man and Superman

J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World provokes violent reactions at its Dublin premiere

Swedish playwright August Strindberg publishes The Ghost Sonata, which has its first performance in Stockholm the following year

Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production by Stanislavsky

J.M. Synge's last and unfinished play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, is performed in Dublin shortly after his death

Hugo von Hofmannsthal adapts the English medieval morality play Everyman ('Jedermann') for performance in Salzburg

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion has its first performance – in a German version in Vienna

The Russian poet and dramatist Vladimir Mayakovsky publishes his first major long poem, A Cloud in Trousers