Timberlake Wertenbaker bases her play Our Country's Good on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker

The Dow-Jones index loses 30% in a dramatic US stock-market collapse

M. Butterfly, by US author and composer David Henry Hwang, uses Puccini's opera as its inspiration

Racing Demon launches a trilogy on the British establishment by English playwright David Hare

Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III is performed at the National Theatre in London

David Mamet's play Oleanna dramatizes the ambiguities of sexual politics

Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, is premiered in London

Art, a play by French-born Iranian playwright Yasmina Reza, has its premiere in Berlin

Bryan Singer directs the film The Usual Suspects, an intricate crime drama written by Christopher McQuarrie

Irish author Marina Carr's play Portia Coughlin is performed at the Abbey Theatre

Irish author Martin McDonagh's play The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first in a trilogy

Steven Spielberg directs Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, a World War II drama about a US paratrooper

Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen dramatizes the visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr in wartime Denmark

Russell Crowe stars in Ridley Scott's film Gladiator, a revenge drama set in second-century Rome

Ayad Akhtar tackles a topical subject with his Pulitzer-Prize drama Disgraced, about a successful American's concealment of his Pakistani Muslim background