Lang, Elke

Actress, stage designer, theater director

Born: 29.10.1952 in Wiesbaden

died: 12.01.1998 in Hamburg

Lang was already an extra on the stage of the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden towards the end of her secondary school years. She trained her expressive acting talent at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich from 1972-1974. She received her first engagements in Augsburg, Landshut, Basel and Hamburg, where she moved in 1978. Over the next few years, she also took part in highly acclaimed productions. In 1981, she staged "Laure" based on Colette Peignot at the Theater in der Druckerei Dankerrt in the Hanseatic city, a production she financed herself, which helped her make her breakthrough as a director. Further stages of her career included the Württembergische Staatstheater Stuttgart, the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Theater am Turm (TAT) there and the Schauspielhaus Wien. In the fall of 1983, she took up a teaching position at the Hochschule für darstellende Kunst in the Main metropolis, by then belonging to the first category of stage artists of her generation, followed by engagements at other drama schools.

With more than 150 performances since 1986, including in Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, Hamburg and Zurich, "Küssebisserisse - Eine Komödie über Männer" by her close friend, partner and colleague of many years, Ulrich Waller, became her most successful production. In 1988, the TAT hired her as a permanent director. After engagements at several other theaters, she joined the ensemble of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 1993 and was a fascinating director and actress in a number of productions. In Vienna, Wuppertal and at the Hamburg Kammerspiele, the theater obsessive also won over audiences in the last years of her life. She preferred avant-garde plays or those that were considered decidedly critical of the times or particularly difficult, such as those by Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Wolfgang Bauer, Gerlind Reinshagen, Thomas Brasch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, Arthur Miller, Heiner Müller and Botho Strauß. But Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, Ibsen, Horváth, even operas by Puccini and Mozart were also part of her extraordinary repertoire, as well as works and productions by Ulrich Waller.

After her marriage to Ulrich Waller in the fall of 1996, she gave a triumphant guest performance in Vienna with "Fräulein Stefan" by Jürg Laederach. The following year, she won over the Wiesbaden audience with her favorite play, "Woyzeck" by Georg Büchner. She herself described this performance as her "best, clearest, most radical and most essential production", but "unfortunately at the wrong theater". She was unable to complete her last work, Büchner's "Danton's Death", at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. She died on her way home from an evening rehearsal of the play. Her Hamburg production of Gorky, which opened the International May Festival in Wiesbaden in 1998, once again drew rapturous applause from the local audience. Lang was buried in the cemetery of San Gusmè near Siena.