Planned premiere: february 28, 2025.
During the more than half-century long dominance of folk plays, it was a bold move in 1909 for the author, Ferenc Molnár, to choose a city-dwelling poor man, an utterly unidealized 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, 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, on stage the focus is not on this question but rather on the moral message of the work: the capacity for forgiveness, the possibility or impossibility of it, and the eternal validity of sin. The interactivity of accusation and penance unfolds in the same space and time, which appears like a vision in the protagonist’s calvary.
Director: Szabó K. István