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

Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud establish their own company at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris

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

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

The musical South Pacific, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway

Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin star as three US sailors on shore leave in the screen version of On the Town

Bertolt Brecht establishes a new theatrical company, the Berliner Ensemble, in East Germany

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

Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner open on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I

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

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

Edna Everage, created by Australian satirist Barry Humphries, makes her first appearance in a Melbourne revue

The musical My Fair Lady, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, opens on Broadway

The English Stage Company, founded by George Devine, opens in London's Royal Court Theatre

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

Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim create the Broadway musical West Side Story

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