Scheduled premiere: 28 February 2025
Considering the over 50-year-long dominance of folk plays, it was a bold move in 1909 for the author, Ferenc Molnár, to choose a poor city-dweller, an utterly non-idealized scoundrel as his protagonist. Whether Molnár was writing about himself and the trials of his relationship and subsequent marriage to Margit Vészi in the character of Liliom as the loafer who seduces the virtuous maid Julika and resorts to physical violence for money, remains a subject of debate among literary historians to this day. However, the focus shift from this question to the moral message of the work: the capacity for forgiveness, the possibility or impossibility of it, and the eternal validity of sin. The interrelatedness of accusation and penance unfolds in the same space and time, which appears like a vision in the protagonist’s calvary.
Director: István K. Szabó
