German author Botho Strauss's play Three Acts of Recognition wins him an international audience

Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart, Amadeus, has its premiere in London

US author Sam Shepard's play True West has its premiere in New York

Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, based on the Old Possum poems by T.S. Eliot, opens in London

Little Shop of Horrors, by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, opens in New York

Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off opens in London's West end

Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is partly inspired by the British actor Donald Wolfit

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

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

Irish author Brian Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa has its premiere at the Abbey Theatre

The Piano Lesson is the second of August Wilson's plays to win a Pulitzer Prize

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

The New York company Dance Theatre of Harlem tours South Africa, with the slogan 'Dancing Through Barriers'

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

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

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

Chechen terrorists take hostage the entire audience of a Moscow theatre in an atrocity resulting in the death of more than 150 people

War Horse, a play with life-size horse puppets by the Handspring Puppet Company,. opens at London's National Theatre and goes on to have an astonishing international success

The theatre in Florence's great new cultural centre, the Parco della Cascine, is inaugurated is celebration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy

The Jean-Claude Carrière Theatre, designed by A+Architecture, is completed in Montpellier