Lang, (Alexander) Matheson (1879–1948), actor-manager and dramatist, born in Canada but brought up in Scotland. Though he came from a clerical family—his cousin Cosmo Lang became Archbishop of Canterbury—and was himself destined for the Church, his determination to go on the stage was strengthened by visits to the productions of
Benson and
Irving when they toured Scotland. He made his first appearance in Wolverhampton in 1897, and later joined Benson, appearing with him in London in 1900 and going on tour with him to the West Indies. In 1904 he was back in London, where he played under the management of Vedrenne and
Granville-Barker at the
Royal Court Theatre in
Ibsen and Shaw. He scored his first outstanding success in Hall Caine's
The Christian (1907) at the Lyceum, where he also gave good performances as Romeo and Hamlet. He then took his own company to South Africa, Australia, and India, playing Shakespeare and modern romantic drama with much success. On his return to London he appeared in
Mr Wu (1913), an improbable Anglo-Chinese melodrama by Harry Vernon and Harold Owen, which was seen all over the world and frequently revived. In 1914 Lang, with his wife
Hutin Britton [
Nellie Britton] (1876–1965), who had been with him in Benson's company and subsequently toured as his leading lady, inaugurated the Shakespeare productions at the
Old Vic under Lilian
Baylis with
The Taming of the Shrew,
Hamlet, and
The Merchant of Venice. Four years later he was in his own adaptation of a French romantic comedy as
The Purple Mask, and in 1920 he was seen in E. Temple Thurston's
The Wandering Jew, which ran for a year and was several times revived.
The Chinese Bungalow (1925) by Marion Osmond and James Corbet was followed by
Dukes's adaptations of two German works—
Such Men Are Dangerous (1928), based on Neumann's
Der Patriot, and
Jew Süss (1929), based on a novel by Feuchtwanger. In his later years Lang appeared mainly on tour in his most successful parts, and in 1941 he moved to South Africa.
