Quai d’Angers

Liliom is a harsh depiction of modern times, with its lovers in the night, dreams of America, carnival, holdup, and resurrection. This "working class fairy tale" by the renowned Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár has inspired director Frédéric Bélier-Garcia to mount an elaborate show that combines melodrama, humor and fantasy - and with all due fanfare.

A fairground fable
What I like about Liliom is its atmosphere of a fairground fairy tale that’s naïve and violent at the same time.
I like its very precise scenes that are like scenes from a fantasy and which appear to arise from the "primitive" imagination of the play’s protagonists and whose tragic torrent spares no one. I’d like to mount this fairground fable in a contemporary idiom that is still true to what attracted me to the play in the first place - namely the odyssey implied by the play, the fairground attractions of our childhood in the indistinct fields of our wanderings, with (of course) a stint in paradise along the way. I’d like to bring to the stage a contemporary odyssey that is at once simple and spectacular and that could "almost" be recounted by (and for) an unruly child.
The play has 11 actors, a lot of music and quite a bit of noise as well.
Frédéric Bélier-Garcia

Molnár on Liliom
I wanted to bring to the stage a story of the Budapest suburbs that was as naïve and primitive as those that old ladies from Josefstadt are wont to tell. As for the symbolic figures and supernatural characters that appear in the play, I didn’t want to attribute more significance to them than a modest vagabond would give them when thinking of them.
That’s why the celestial judge in Liliom is a policeman in charge of drawing up reports; that’s why the it’s the detectives of God and not the angels who awaken the dead barker; that’s why I haven’t concerned myself with determining whether the play is an oneric play, a fairy tale or a story; that’s why I’ve allowed the play to have this unfinished quality, and to have a static simplicity that’s characteristic of contemporary naïve stories in which you’re certainly not overly surprised to hear a corpse start talking all of a sudden. Does the author have the right to plunge us into perplexity? Does he have the right to ask the audience not wonder "Is this story a dream?" and "How can a dead man come back to life and carry out his daily tasks, and do something?"

Ferenc Molnár (English translation by Robert Nusbaum, based on Niki Théron’s translation into French from the Hungarian)

Excerpt from Liliom:

Julie: You could at least say hello.
Liliom: What for? Why are you looking for me?
Julie: I’m not looking for you.
Liliom: So then shut your trap. You’re going to tell me yet again that I’ve been out all night, that I have no money, that there’s nothing to eat.
Julie: I’m not saying anything.
Liliom: I can see that you’re about to say it. Get out of here.
He paces up and down, furious. Everyone is afraid of him and recoils when he approaches.