King Stag
Product details
- ISBN 9783039422746
- Weight: 1150g
- Dimensions: 150 x 225mm
- Publication Date: 20 Oct 2025
- Publisher: Scheidegger und Spiess AG, Verlag
- Publication City/Country: CH
- Product Form: Paperback
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King Stag is a play originally written in 1762 by Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell’arte Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). 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 (1873–1963) and director Werner Wolff (1886–1972) produced a modern adaption of Gozzi’s fairy-tale play that turned it into an amusing parody of Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Gustav Jung’s 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 (1889–1943) 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 Wolff’s adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of a restaging of the puppetry, produced especially for this volume, featuring Taeuber-Arp’s 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 Switzerland’s avant-garde.
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is Switzerland’s leading museum of design and visual communication. Its widely renowned collection comprises more than 500,000 objects representing Swiss and international design history. Sabine Flaschberger is curator of Museum für Gestaltung Zürich’s decorative arts collection. Petra Schmid is head of publications at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
