King Stag is a play originally written in 1762 by Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dellarte Carlo Gozzi (17201806). It is about love and conspiracy at the court of King Deramo. In search of a bride, Deramo falls victim to the intrigues of his adversary Tartaglia and is temporarily transformed into a stag.
In 1918, on the occasion of a major art exhibition staged in Zurich by the modernist association Swiss Werkbund, Swiss dramatist René Morax (18731963) and director Werner Wolff (18861972) produced a modern adaption of Gozzis fairy-tale play that turned it into an amusing parody of Sigmund Freuds and Carl Gustav Jungs psychoanalysis, which had caused much controversy in Zurich at the time. The production was conceived as a puppetry, for which avant-garde artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (18891943) designed the stage sets and created an ensemble of 17 radically abstracted marionettes that broke with every tradition of the genre.
This book offers the first English translation of Morax and Wolffs adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of a restaging of the puppetry, produced especially for this volume, featuring Taeuber-Arps striking marionettes. Essays by distinguished scholars explore the genesis of the original 1918 production and place it in historical context, shed new light on the play and its model, the Commedia dell'arte, and highlight its significance for Switzerlands avant-garde.
