1911 TESTÖR (Played in this country as “Where Ignorance is Bliss”).
1913 A FARKAS (Played in this country as “The Phantom Rival”).
1914 URIDIVAT (Attorney for Defence).
1919 A HATTYU (The Swan).
1920 SZINHAZ (Theatre: Three One-Act Plays).
Undoubtedly the greatest of these is LILIOM. Indeed, I know of no play written in our own time which matches the amazing virtuosity of LILIOM, its imaginative daring, its uncanny blending of naturalism and fantasy, humor and pathos, tenderness and tragedy into a solid dramatic structure. At first reading it may seem a mere improvization in many moods, but closer study must reveal how the moods are as inevitably related to each other as pearls on a string.
And where in modern dramatic literature can such pearls be matched—Julie incoherently confessing to her dead lover the love she had always been ashamed to tell; Liliom crying out to the distant carousel the glad news that he is to be a father; the two thieves gambling for the spoils of their prospective robbery; Marie and Wolf posing for their portrait while the broken-hearted Julie stands looking after the vanishing Liliom, the thieves’ song ringing in her ears; the two policemen grousing about pay and pensions while Liliom lies bleeding to death; Liliom furtively proffering his daughter the star he has stolen for her in heaven. . . . The temptation to count the whole scintillating string is difficult to resist.
What is the moral of LILIOM? Nothing you can reduce to a creed. Molnar is not a preacher or a propagandist for any theory of life. You will look in vain in his plays for moral or dogma. His philosophy—if philosophy you can call it—is always implicit. And nothing is plainer than that his picture of a courtroom in the beyond is neither devoutly nor satirically intended. Liliom’s Heaven is the Heaven of his own imagining. And what is more natural than that it should be an irrational jumble of priest’s purgatory, police magistrate’s justice and his own limited conception of good deeds and evil?
For those who hold that every fine dramatic architecture must have its spire of meaning, that by the very selection of character and incident the dramatist writes his commentary on life, there is still an explanation possible. Perhaps Molnar was at the old, old task of revaluing our ideas of good and evil. Perhaps he has only shown how the difference between a bully, a wife-beater and a criminal on the one hand and a saint on the other can be very slight. If one must tag LILIOM with a moral, I prefer to read mine in Liliom’s dying speech to Julie wherein he says: “Nobody’s right . . . but they all think they are right. . . . A lot they know.”