Summary
A travelling troupe of barnstormers limps into a sleepy provincial town, their wagons rattling with moth-eaten costumes and half-forgotten dreams. At the center of this motley caravan stands Liliomfi, a quick-witted actor-poet who trades quips like currency and whose very name is a mask, borrowed from a discarded playbill to dodge a vengeful landlord. He collides—first verbally, then carnally—with Mariska, a spirited innkeeper’s daughter who has spent too many nights polishing tankards while reading Schiller by candle-grease. Their sparring ignites a farcical chain of mistaken identities: the pompous notary believes Liliomfi is the famed Budapest critic he’s bribed to praise his wobbly production of a patriotic melodrama; the local burgomaster swears the same vagabond is an incognito prince scouting locations for a royal casino. Meanwhile, the real prince of the company—an aging ham who once declaimed Shakespeare to field artillery—clutches his last remaining prop, a tarnished foil, while the wardrobe mistress unpicks petticoats to fashion emergency wigs. Amid door-slamming midnight chases through haylofts and confessionals, love letters land in the wrong cassocks, dowries evaporate, and a goose intended for the bishop’s table ends up wearing a tutu onstage. When the curtain finally falls, the masks drop: Liliomfi confesses his name is as hollow as the footlights, Mariska admits she’d rather run off with a penniless jester than marry the grocer’s heir, and the whole scruffy ensemble boards the dawn train, poorer in purse yet richer in the delirious certainty that somewhere down the line another village awaits their beautiful lies.
