King Stag: The Marionettes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the Manuscript by René Morax and Werner Wolff

The first English translation of René Morax and Werner Wolff’s avant-garde adaption of King Stag.

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 Schweizer 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 Dada parody of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalysis, which had caused much controversy in Zurich at the time. The production was conceived as puppetry, for which avant-garde artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) designed the stage sets and an ensemble of seventeen radically abstracted marionettes. Her designs broke with every tradition of the genre and were influenced by her work in fine and applied art, as well as her experience with expressive dance.

This book offers the first English translation of Morax and Wolff’s adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of Taeuber-Arp’s iconic 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 highlight its significance for Switzerland’s avant-garde.

Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is Switzerland’s leading museum of design and visual communication. Sabine Flaschberger is curator of Museum für Gestaltung Zürich’s decorative arts collection.