The play opens amidst thunder and lightning, and the Three Witches decide that their next meeting shall be with Macbeth.

* 1952 – Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London later becoming the longest continuously-running play in history.

The play opens with Roderigo, a rich and dissolute gentleman, complaining to Iago, a high-ranking soldier, that Iago has not told him about the secret marriage between Desdemona, the daughter of a Senator named Brabantio, and Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army.

In the game of poker, opens and raises are considered aggressive plays, while calls and checks are considered passive ( though a check-raise would be considered a very aggressive play ).

The play opens with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betting on coin flips.

Examining him will cause a jingle ( that which plays when the player completes a puzzle or opens a doorway in The Legend of Zelda games ) to play.

In 2005 the Abbey Theatre produced the play with an all male cast ; it also featured Wilde as a character – the play opens with him drinking in a Parisian café, dreaming of his play .. More recently the Melbourne Theatre Company staged a production in December 2011 with Geoffrey Rush playing Lady Bracknell.

Set in “ The Present ” ( 1895 ) in London, the play opens with Algernon Moncrieff, an idle young gentleman, receiving his best friend, John Worthing, whom he knows as Ernest.

The play opens with Estragon struggling to remove a boot.

Act II opens with Vladimir singing a recursive round about a dog, which could illustrate the cyclical nature of the play's universe, and also point toward the play's debt to the carnivalesque, music hall traditions, and vaudeville comedy ( this is only one of a number of canine references and allusions in the play ).

* December 25 – Why Marry ?, the first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.

* July 12 – Laurence Olivier's film Henry V, based on Shakespeare's play, opens in London.

* April 19 – Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, a musical play based on Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, opens on Broadway and becomes their second long-running stage classic.

* January 5 – The play The Scarlet Pimpernel opens at the New Theatre in London and begins a run of 122 performances and numerous revivals.

** The Fantasticks, the world's longest-running musical, opens at New York City's Sullivan Street Playhouse where it will play for 42 years.

* February 7 – The play La vida alegre y muerte triste by dramatist José Echegaray opens.

* October 12 – The play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial opens at Plymouth Theatre, New York.

* December 27 – Kern and Hammerstein's musical play, Show Boat, based on Edna Ferber's novel, opens on Broadway and then goes on to become the first great classic of the American musical theater.

* October – The first national stage in Sweden opens when the play Den Svenska Sprätthöken is performed in the native language, by the first native actors, on the stage of Bollhuset in Stockholm.

The play opens with a formal ceremony in which King Lear seemingly divides his kingdom among his daughters according to their avowals of their love for him.

The play opens on 10 April 1809, in a garden front room of a country house in Derbyshire with tutor Septimus Hodge trying to distract his 13 year-old pupil Thomasina from her enquiries as to the meaning of a " carnal embrace " by challenging her to prove Fermat's Last Theorem so he can focus on reading the poem ' The Couch of Eros ', a piece written by another character, Mr. Ezra Chater.

Instead, the audience can sit back at ease and, from the perspective of an enlightened time which no longer believes in such things, enjoy the dead seriousness with which the characters in the play take the witches and devils which are under discussion.

As the play unfolds, however, the audience is subtly brought into the grip of an awful evil which grows with ominously gathering power and soon engulfs the community.

The audience leaves the play under a spell, It is the kind of spell which the exposure to spirit in its living active manifestation always evokes.

His reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play (" God help it ") was simply " Christopher Robin grown up ... what an obsession with me children are become!

One play, The Demi-Virgin in 1921, prompted a court case because of its suggestive subject matter, including a risque game of cards, " Stripping Cupid ", where a bevy of showgirls teased the audience in their lingerie.

The play is noted for breaking traditional barriers between performers and audience.

I came up with the idea of split-screen, to be able to show the actual audience involvement, to trace the life of the audience and that of the play as they merge in and out of each other.

Several performances of the play have even ignored the stage direction to have the Ghost of Banquo enter at all, heightening the sense that Macbeth is growing mad, since the audience cannot see what he claims to see.

Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level ; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of a large audience.

As a child, she wrote a play called Toyland in which she performed to a small audience at a dinner party.

In the same year Tzara staged his Dadaist play The Gas Heart to howls of derision from the audience.

The audience may have a passive role, as in the case of persons watching a play or opera, a television show or a movie, or active, as in the case of a video game.

A cast member would play some yokel who would have some kind of bad talent, which would almost always end up with the audience booing it ; throwing vegetables and the hook operator yanking said act forcibly off the stage.

Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

George Bernard Shaw's praise for Johnston Forbes-Robertson's performance contains a sideswipe at Irving: " The story of the play was perfectly intelligible, and quite took the attention of the audience off the principal actor at moments.

Finally, Townshend asked the audience, " Can anyone play the drums?

Formal Latin literature began in 240 BC, when a Roman audience saw a Latin version of a Greek play.

Throughout the whole sketch, the English version of the joke is never revealed to the audience, ostensibly because of the fear that the ' audience ' might drop dead from laughter, the deaths in the sketch serving to play up the joke's alleged lethality.

Stations will not get good ratings or revenue if they frequently play songs unfamiliar to their audience.

* 1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.

The Bottler might also play accompanying music or sound effects on a drum or guitar and engage in back chat with the puppets, sometimes repeating lines that may have been difficult for the audience to understand.

The first Trips Festival, sponsored by the Merry Pranksters and held at the Longshoremen's Hall in January 1966, saw The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company play to an audience of 10, 000, giving many their first encounter with both acid rock, with its long instrumentals and unstructured jams, and LSD.