Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence star in the West End in Private Lives, Coward's comedy of marital complications

The trilogy Mourning becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill's transposition to New England of the Oresteia story, is performed in New York

Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg's Group Theatre present their first professional production, The House of Connelly by Paul Green

French playwright Jean Anouilh has his first play, L'Hermine, produced and published

George Balanchine, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaborate in Paris on Seven Deadly Sins, a ballet with songs

García Lorca writes his play Blood Wedding while he is director of a company touring in rural Spain

Dmitry Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District has its premiere in Leningrad's Maly Theatre

In Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour two teachers are maliciously accused of lesbianism by one of their pupils

T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral has its first performance in Canterbury cathedral

García Lorca writes his play The House of Bernarda Alba in the last year of his short life

Paul Robeson sings 'Ol' Man River' in the film of Jerome Kern's Showboat

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

Thornton Wilder's play Our Town opens on Broadway

American Ballet Theatre, directed by Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant, begins its first season in New York

Gene Kelly makes his name on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey

British actors Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier marry

US choreographer Agnes de Mille creates Black Ritual for American Ballet Theatre

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

French author Marguerite Duras makes her name with her partly autobiographical novel The Sea Wall

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

The musical Oklahoma! launches the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

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

Fancy Free becomes On the Town, a Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein, directed by Jerome Robbins

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

Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes has its premiere in London, at the Sadler's Wells theatre