Kornél Mundruczó’s 2019 Hamburg performance of Liliom is in the focus of this paper. The reception of Ferenc Molnár’s play in the past forty, fifty years clearly demonstrates that the work became an internationally cited and canonised classic. Certainly in the sense that while it maintains its historically inherited foreignness in the context of the interpretation’s present day, whenever that may be, it nevertheless offers surprisingly sharp answers to specific present-day issues. In this paper, I will review the stylistic characteristics of the performance, focusing on the question – how does this interpretation reshape our previous knowledge of the play Liliom.