Andrzej Chyra

Andrzej Chyra: The Actor Who Kept Something Back

In 2006, the director Krzysztof Krauze wrote a line about Andrzej Chyra in *Polityka* that has followed him ever since: his acting, Krauze said, "leaves a certain hunger in viewers and directors, who sense untapped potential within him." It is an odd compliment — a review of what an actor has not yet done — and it is also the most precise thing anyone has said about him. Chyra's screen presence is built on withholding. In *W imię...* he plays a Catholic priest running a rural reformatory who is in love with one of the boys in his care, and for most of the film's length the performance consists almost entirely of things not said, not done and not admitted. It won him Best Actor at Gdynia in 2013 and made a devout country very uncomfortable.

Gryfów Śląski

Andrzej Chyra was born on 27 August 1964 in Gryfów Śląski, a small town in Lower Silesia in the far south-west of Poland. He went to Warsaw, to the state drama academy, and did something unusual there: he took two degrees. He graduated from the acting department in 1987, and then returned and graduated from the directing department in 1994. The double training is not a footnote. It explains why Chyra reads scenes structurally, why he has been able to move into staging opera and drama in his own right, and why directors describe him as a collaborator rather than an instrument.

Dług, and the Face of the Nineties

His cinema debut came in 1993, in *Order of Affection*. The role that made him arrived six years later, in Krzysztof Krauze's *Dług* — *The Debt* — in which he played Gerard Nowak, the ordinary man crushed by an extortionist in the lawless economy of post-communist Poland. It is one of the defining Polish films of the decade, drawn from a real criminal case, and Chyra's performance in it is the reason. He took Best Actor at the Gdynia Film Festival in 1999 and the Eagle, Poland's national film award, for Best Supporting Actor in 2000.

He repeated the trick in 2005 with *Komornik* — *The Collector* — playing a bailiff who seizes the possessions of the poor with unembarrassed efficiency until the job begins to dismantle him. Gdynia gave him Best Actor again; the Polish Film Awards gave him the Eagle for Best Male Lead in 2006. Between and around them came a working actor's spread of Polish cinema: *The Hexer* (2001), *We're All Christs* (2006), Andrzej Wajda's *Katyń* (2007), *All That I Love* (2009), *Stones for the Rampart* (2014), *United States of Love* (2016), Krzysztof Zanussi's *Ether* (2018), and more recently *Never Gonna Snow Again* and *All Our Fears* in 2021. He has worked repeatedly with Wajda, Krauze and Zanussi, and is a member of both the Polish Film Academy and the European Film Academy.

Father Adam

Małgorzata Szumowska's *W imię...* premiered at the Berlinale in 2013. Szumowska, who had practised Catholicism for over a decade before losing her faith, wanted to make a film about a priest's humanity and sexuality without turning him into an argument. "I was trying to portray him as a good person and at the same time to show the paradox of faith," she said — and she was, by her own admission, afraid the film would be "used in political discussions" in Poland. It duly was.

Chyra's approach was to take the vocation seriously. He researched the fact that Father Adam had made a conscious adult commitment to the priesthood rather than drifting into it, and insisted that the priest's care for the damaged boys in the reformatory is real, not a cover. He fixed on the character's running, which the film uses as its central image: "When he's running, he says he's praying as well." For an actor who had spent fifteen years being cast as hard men, it was, he noted with some relief, a departure from the tough-guy line.

The Other Career

Since 2001 Chyra has been one of the core performers in the company of Krzysztof Warlikowski, the most internationally celebrated Polish theatre director of his generation, appearing in *The Bacchae*, *Hamlet*, *The Tempest*, *Angels in America* and *A Streetcar Named Desire*, and continuing as a regular at Warlikowski's Nowy Teatr in Warsaw. This is not a sideline; in Polish terms it is the more prestigious half of his working life.

The directing degree eventually cashed in. He made his operatic debut in 2013 with Shostakovich's *The Gamblers*, and in 2015 directed *The Magic Mountain* at the Malta Festival, for which he won the Konrad Swinarski Award — the most serious prize in Polish theatre directing. In 2019 he was given the Zbigniew Cybulski Award for lifetime achievement.

Why Andrzej Is Called a Genius

The word does not appear in the record around Chyra; what appears instead is Krauze's phrase about hunger and untapped potential, which is a stranger and more useful claim. The specific thing Chyra does is subtraction. Where most screen actors build a character by adding — a tic, a rhythm, a wound made visible — Chyra removes, and plays the gap. In *Komornik* the bailiff's cruelty is administered without heat, and the horror is that nothing registers on the man's face. In *W imię...* the priest's desire is legible almost nowhere; the audience infers it from what he avoids. The technique demands enormous confidence, because it puts the meaning of the scene outside the actor and into the viewer, and it fails completely if the actor's interior life is not actually there. Krauze's "hunger" is the effect working: a director watches Chyra and believes there is more behind the face than the shot is showing.

The counter-case is that this is a limited palette, and Chyra has been criticised — implicitly, by the Krauze line itself — for never fully spending what he has. He selects roles carefully and works infrequently by the standards of Polish cinema. The Eagles and the Gdynia prizes are national, not international; his global profile rests substantially on one film, and that film's fame in the Anglophone world owes as much to its subject as to his work in it. Against that sits the one genuinely unusual credential: he is a Best Actor winner who also holds a directing degree and has won the Swinarski Award for staging Thomas Mann. Very few actors anywhere have crossed that line convincingly. Genius overstates it; unusually complete theatre intelligence, deployed with a discipline that borders on stinginess, does not.

Legacy

Chyra's career maps the arc of Polish cinema since 1989 with unusual exactness. *Dług* is the film of the violent, improvised nineties; *Komornik* is the film of the grinding, legalised cruelty that followed; *W imię...* is the film of the country's argument with its own Church. In each of them, the audience is asked to look at an unlikeable Polish man and understand him anyway, and in each case Chyra supplies the understanding by refusing to plead. The Swinarski Award and the Cybulski lifetime prize confirm what the film awards only imply: that his real subject is not any of these characters but the discipline of holding something back until the audience comes and gets it.

Achievements

• Worked as stage actor, film actor and film director