He was one of the best-known and most distinctive theatre men of the former GDR, and also one of the wittiest: Alexander Lang shook up the theatre scene in East Berlin as an actor and, since the late 1970s, increasingly as a director, and played a decisive role in shaping it, especially at the Deutsches Theater. With his productions of classics, he added splashes of colour, broke new ground and, mostly with the weapon of witty and black humour, took liberties with interpretation, freeing the classic texts from cliché images and taking them from the noble pedestal of role models into a mostly deliberately artificial stage world. His sometimes almost expressionistic productions attracted attention and were acclaimed. He was a star director who had also worked in western theatres since the 1980s, sometimes in a leading role.
Actor and theatre director Alexander Lang is dead: An obituary – Culture
