Terence Rattigan's first play, French without Tears, is performed in London

Thornton Wilder's play Our Town opens on Broadway

A dramatized version of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, broadcast on US radio, terrifies listeners who think Martians are invading

Bertolt Brecht's play set in the Thirty Years' War, Mother Courage, has its first performance in Zurich

Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of our Teeth has a mixed reception at its New Haven premiere

Jean-Paul Sartre begins a new career as a dramatist with his first play, The Flies ('Les Mouches')

US dramatist Tennessee Williams has his first success with The Glass Menagerie

Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, set in a down-and-out bar of the kind he had known in his youth, is performed in New York

Bertolt Brecht's play The Life of Galileo has its premiere in Los Angeles with Charles Laughton in the lead

Marlon Brando stars on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar named Desire

J.B. Priestley challenges audiences with An Inspector Calls, a play in which moral guilt spreads like an infection

Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning engages in high-spirited poetic word play

George Balanchine's New York City Ballet becomes the resident company in the City Center for Music and Drama

Death of a Salesman, by US playwright Arthur Miller, has its first performance in New York

French dramatist Eugène Ionesco's play The Bald Prima Donna launches the Theatre of the Absurd

Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot ('En attendant Godot') is first performed in French in Paris

Arthur Miller's play The Crucible uses the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the contemporary paranoia of McCarthyism

Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood, is broadcast on BBC radio, with Richard Burton as narrator

Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is performed in New York

The Visit, by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, has its premiere in Zürich

Eugene O'Neill's searing account of tensions within his own family, Long Day's Journey into Night, has its premiere in Stockholm

John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger features in the first season of London's new English Stage Company

Laurence Olivier brings the music-hall artist Archie Rice vibrantly to life in John Osborne's The Entertainer

Irish dramatist Brendan Behan's play The Hostage is produced in Dublin