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    Kornel Mundruczo Brings Powerful Imagery to Wagner and Film

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    Kornel Mundruczo’s varied career has included the Oscar-nominated movie “Pieces of a Woman,” stage productions across Europe and now, “Lohengrin.”MUNICH — On a recent morning, the atmosphere on the rehearsal stage of the Bayerische Staatsoper, the main opera house here, was charged with anticipation.The director Kornel Mundruczo was supervising Act I of “Lohengrin,” Richard Wagner’s romantic opera about a mysterious knight sent by the Holy Grail to save a damsel in distress, and as they waited for the title character to appear, the vocal soloists and extras milled about in street clothes among rocks and grass scattered on the stage.Mundruczo made adjustments to the performers’ positions and gestures, ensuring that they conveyed nervous excitement. When Lohengrin, played by Klaus Florian Vogt, casually appeared midway through the act, Mundruczo surveyed the scene.“That’s super good,” he said with satisfaction.When the opera opens here on Saturday, it will close an uncommonly busy — and varied — year for the prolific Hungarian director.Over the past 12 months, Mundruczo, 47, has overseen a world premiere opera in Berlin and Geneva; a new play in Berlin; Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” in Hamburg, Germany; and has directed four of 10 episodes in the first season of the Apple TV+ series “The Crowded Room.”Serge Dorny, the Bayerische Staatsoper’s general manager, said he saw “Lohengrin” as “an extremely contemporary story,” adding that Mundruczo’s interest in topical themes, and how he has handled them over a range of artistic genres, was in part what led him to enlist the director for “Lohengrin.”Mundruczo’s production of “Lohengrin” at Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. Over the past two decades, he has produced a multifaceted body of work across numerous countries, languages and genres.W. HoeslEqually important, however, was Mundruczo’s ability to create “powerful images that stay in our memories,” Dorny said.Mundruczo’s style is direct and emotional, but it is often tinged with fantastical elements that veer into magical realism: In one particularly vivid example, a recent Mundruczo production was set almost entirely inside a gigantic salmon.While Vogt said that Mundruczo’s background in film was clear from his ability to create “intense images” in “Lohengrin,” the singer called Mundruczo a “deeply musical person,” who had enormous respect for the score.This artistic versatility makes Mundruczo a rarity among today’s directors. Over the past two decades, he has produced a multifaceted body of work across numerous countries, languages and genres.In the English-speaking world, Mundruczo is best known for his 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” which garnered acclaim for the director, its writer, Kata Weber, and its lead actress, Vanessa Kirby, who earned an Oscar nomination for her turn as a mother processing the death of her newborn. Martin Scorsese signed on as an executive producer after seeing an early cut of the film.“With Kornel, you feel and see a real drive to express something in images and sounds,” Scorsese wrote in an emailed statement. “It’s real cinematic storytelling. No matter what Kornel makes, I’m interested.”Vanessa Kirby earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”Benjamin Loeb/NetflixMundruczo’s production of the opera “Sleepless” was dominated by a giant salmon.Nina Hansch/picture alliance, via Getty ImagesBorn in 1975 in Godollo, a small city outside Budapest, Mundruczo dreamed of becoming a painter as a teenager, but when he first picked up a camera at 21, he knew filmmaking was what he was meant to do.“I wasn’t planning for it to happen, but for me there was no longer any question,” Mundruczo said in an earlier interview in Berlin. “That hasn’t changed.”The director characterized his early shorts and first three features as “bohemian friendship movies, like early Almodóvar,” he created with “whoever was around,” he said, referring to the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. Mundruczo made his first feature film in 2000 while still a student. Of the eight that have come since, six have premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, including “White God” (2014), which features a canine takeover of Budapest, and “Jupiter’s Moon” (2017), in which a Syrian refugee learns to fly.While building up his film career, Mundruczo also started directing plays for an independent theater group. In 2009, he co-founded Proton Theater in Budapest, where he serves as artistic director. Before long, his stage productions were getting attention on the international theater festival circuit.Mundruczo suggested that his outsider status as a filmmaker had helped him bring a new perspective to his stage productions, which tour throughout Europe. “I’m not a theater person,” he said, “and the theater festival system always needs new voices.”The director also welcomes a certain degree of cross-pollination between his stage and screen work. Before it was a film, “Pieces of a Woman” was a play written by Weber and first performed in 2018 at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw. “Evolution,” another collaboration between Weber and Mundruczo (who are both romantic and artistic partners), started life as part of a staged performance before they developed it into a film.When it comes to switching between genres, “I enjoy that it’s other parts of your soul working,” Mundruczo said. Gordon Welters for The New York Times“Evolution,” which premiered at the 2019 Ruhrtriennale festival in Bochum, Germany, was one of a string of productions in that country that inspired Mundruczo and Weber to move to Berlin from Budapest with their daughter several years ago. They were also guided by concerns about the political situation in Hungary, which continues its rightward slide under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.“I’m sure every New Yorker felt the same during the Trump era,” he said. “It can be tough. You feel a certain pressure.”Although he has never faced direct censorship in Hungary, the Hungarian National Film Board rejected funding for “Pieces of a Woman,” Mundruczo said. “They sent a beautiful letter — I still have it — they wrote that there is no audience for this movie,” he said.When it became a play in Warsaw, its Jewish themes, which were inspired by Weber’s family history, fell by the wayside. “Not that many Jewish people live in Poland, and we all know why,” Mundruczo said. Weber was able to restore some of the Jewish content in the film version, which moved the action to Boston, a city with a large Jewish population.Several of those themes, including a miraculous tale of survival at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, are elaborated in the film “Evolution,” a multigenerational tale that begins in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and ends in modern-day Berlin.Since “Evolution” premiered at Cannes in summer 2021, Mundruczo has taken a hiatus from the silver screen. This year he made his debut at Berlin’s Staatsoper, directing the world premiere of Peter Eotvos’s “Sleepless,” the production dominated by a giant salmon.Matthias Schulz, the general manager of the Berlin State Opera, said that “first of all,” Mundruczo was a filmmaker. “He’s very precise and gives a lot of hints, just like he has to do when making a movie,” he said, describing “Sleepless” as having the atmosphere of “an opera and a movie at the same time.”Both the Berlin State Opera and Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper have invited Mundruczo back to direct in future seasons. In addition to making “The Crowded Room” for the small screen, Mundruczo hopes to return to filmmaking soon, although he said that it was too early to share project details.When it comes to switching between opera, dramatic theater, television and film, “I enjoy that it’s other parts of your soul working,” Mundruczo said. “It’s very healthy when you’re not a one genre maniac,” he added.Perhaps someday he’ll be able to devote himself exclusively to one art form. “But I’m not there yet,” he said with a laugh. More

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      New Playwrights’ Voices, in the Land Where Directors Rule

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      Bold takes on classic works defined theater in Germany for decades. But many playhouses are turning to new works by international dramatists.BERLIN — Germany has a rich tradition of dramatists, from Goethe to Brecht, but ask people here to name a contemporary German playwright and you’ll probably draw a blank. Over the past few decades, the creative space once occupied by playwrights in Germany has largely been filled by directors, whose takes on the dramatic repertory — and notably the classics — are often so refreshingly different that their productions can be considered new works in their own right.This season, however, some of the country’s leading playhouses are putting a renewed emphasis on cultivating new literary voices, stories and approaches to drama. And because this is happening in globalized 21st-century Europe — or perhaps because of a paucity of A-list homegrown playwrights — a surprising amount of new work on German stages comes from the pens of international dramatists.One of the most prominent places where that’s happening is the Berlin Volksbühne, a rare German theater run by a playwright. After debuting three of his own works earlier this season, the Volksbühne’s new leader, René Pollesch, ushered in 2022 with the world premiere of Kata Weber’s “MiniMe.” Like many of this Hungarian writer’s works (she’s best known for the play and film “Pieces of a Woman”), the production was directed by Kornel Mundruczo, her artistic and romantic partner. Sadly, the couple, who also recently worked on the premiere of an opera at the nearby Staatsoper, failed to hit the mark with their latest collaboration — which, for better or worse, has nothing to do with the diminutive character played by Verne Troyer in the “Austin Powers” movies.With “MiniMe,” Weber and Mundruczo have fashioned a nasty 90-minute domestic horror sitcom about a preteen girl (the exceptional 10-year-old newcomer Maia Rae Domagala, whose performance is one of the evening’s few saving graces) and her mother, an ex-model who is grooming her as a JonBenét Ramsey-type child beauty queen. But Weber never entirely makes us buy the disturbing premise of a mother so intent on fashioning her daughter in her own image that — spoiler alert — she gives the child Botox injections.“Doughnuts,” by Toshiki Okada, at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Fabian HammerlMini’s ineffectual father is a dead weight at the center of the play, which expends far too much time on the parents’ boring marital issues rather than exploring the perverse mother-daughter relationship.Things aren’t much enlivened by Mundruczo’s elegant production, featuring fluid video work and a live soundtrack as well as an underutilized onstage pool with a flamingo float. The handsome set of a slick yet sterile suburban house lends the production a degree of naturalistic detail uncommon on German stages, which generally favor abstract or stylized approaches; it underscores the materialism and superficiality that destroy the play’s characters.Realism is the last thing you would associate with Toshiki Okada, the prolific Japanese theater artist, whose newest work, “Doughnuts,” recently premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (“Doughnuts” will also play in Berlin in May, as part of Theatertreffen, an annual celebration of the best theater from around the German-speaking world.) Over 75 minutes, six actors inhabit a stranger and more claustrophobic world than that of “MiniMe,” and yet, paradoxically, it seems somehow truer and more in touch with now.The play’s absurd premise, in which a group of notables are trapped in the lobby of a fashionable hotel — perhaps they are academics, perhaps businesspeople — brings to mind the work of Beckett and Buñuel. As they converse with one another and a comically ineffectual receptionist, the actors perform precise movements that update traditional Japanese Noh theater techniques and seem to illustrate, interpret or even contradict their dialogue. The actors are pitch perfect as they accompany their precisely declaimed monologues, on subjects ranging from the hotel’s amenities to a bear terrorizing a nearby supermarket, with cryptic and often hilarious gestures.“Our Time,” by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone, at the Residenztheater in Munich.Birgit HupfeldIn Germany, Okada is one of several prominent playwrights who frequently stage their own works in aesthetically distinctive productions, allowing them to exert a rare measure of control. Another is the Australian writer-director Simon Stone.Stone’s latest play, “Our Time,” at the Residenztheater in Munich, is a sprawling five-and-a-half-hour contemporary saga loosely inspired by the works of Odon von Horvath. That Austrian writer vividly chronicled life in Europe shortly before World War II, but Stone’s drama plays out in our own troubled age.Over three acts, we follow 15 characters over the course of six years, from 2015, when Germany began welcoming over a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, up to the coronavirus pandemic. This makes for absorbing theater, despite a few soap-operatic touches, wild coincidences and some speechifying toward the end. Performed entirely in and around a hyper-realistic mock-up of a gas station convenience store, “Our Time” works best when the dialogue settles into a natural, unforced register. The impressive cast is drawn from the Residenztheater’s vast ensemble, which has been getting quite a workout in a series of marathon productions this season.“Our Time” currently shares the program at the Residenztheater with work by Shakespeare and Molière. A different Munich theater, however, has shown a more extensive commitment to new dramatists: The Münchner Kammerspiele, like the Volksbühne, is betting on new plays to form the backbone of its repertory under a new artistic director, Barbara Mundel.From left, Vincent Redetzki, Stefan Merki and Gro Swantje Kohlhof in “Jeeps,” written and directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud, at the Kammerspiele in Munich.Armin SmailovicThe pandemic has complicated these efforts. Luring audiences into theaters has been difficult everywhere, but it’s a particular challenge when the playwrights are unfamiliar. Many recent Kammerspiele shows I’ve caught were poorly attended. So I was glad to see that Munich theater lovers turned up in droves for a recent performance of “Jeeps,” a new comedy from the young German writer and director Nora Abdel-Maksoud, which has one of the best premises of any play I’ve seen in a long while: In the not-too-distant future, inheritance has been abolished. Instead, estates are distributed by a lottery administered by the Job Center, a dreary office where both the unemployed and the recently disinherited gather in hopes of scoring a winning ticket.“Jeeps” is a smart, loopy and fast-paced farce, but the actual satire seems slight and, judging from the all the belly laughs, mostly harmless. Who or what exactly is being skewered here, I wondered. The audience was having too good a time to be provoked, let alone discomfited. Still, there is no doubt about the talents and charisma of the four actors who embellish Abdel-Maksoud’s firecracker dialogue and simple, unadorned staging — a far cry from Stone’s and Okada’s more stylish productions — with verbal and physical high jinks. The Kammerspiele clearly has a hit on its hands. That’s an encouraging sign for the direction that Mundel is charting for her house as an incubator of new dramatic voices.MiniMe. Directed by Kornel Mundruczo. Through March 28 at the Volksbühne.Doughnuts. Directed by Toshiki Okada. Through March 28 at the Thalia Theater.Unsere Zeit. Directed by Simon Stone. Through March 13 at the Residenztheater.Jeeps. Directed by Nora Abdel-Maksoud. Through March 29 at the Münchner Kammerspiele. More

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      Broken Women, Made Whole Onstage

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      In Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman” and an Annie Ernaux adaptation, “Memory of a Girl,” stage directors explore post-traumatic psychology and the workings of mental recall.HAMBURG, Germany — Anyone who saw the 2020 film “Pieces of a Woman,” on Netflix or the big screen, will not soon forget its 22-minute single-take opening scene of a home birth. For those who haven’t yet seen Kornel Mundruczo’s movie, I won’t be revealing too much by saying that things take a turn for the worse in that technically dazzling sequence.The effect is remarkably similar to what Mundruczo, a Hungarian director, put onstage for the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw in his 2018 production of “Pieces of a Woman,” which was recently performed at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. (The piece is in TR Warszawa’s repertory and will next tour to Naples, Italy, in March.) The birth takes place largely behind closed doors, and the audience watches a live video feed that is projected onto the front of the closed set. As in the film, Mundruczo gives us the birth in a single, heart-stopping shot, with no cuts to enable the audience to catch its breath.While comparisons between films and the plays they are based on have their limits, the stage version is altogether richer, more intimate and more fully imagined than the one onscreen.The play’s author, Kata Weber, who is Mundruczo’s wife, treats the harrowing birth as a prologue to a magisterially drawn-out dinner. Clocking in at close to two hours, it’s a family meal that feels like a one-act drama in its own right.Magdalena Kuta as the stern foster mother in “Pieces of a Woman”.Natalia KabanowIt’s been six months since the tragic evening that opens the play, and the grieving woman and her husband show up for roast duck and painful revelations. Unlike the film, which was a vehicle for its star, Vanessa Kirby (who won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Oscar nod), the stage version is less a character study than a portrait of the ways that relationships among parents, children, siblings and partners fray in the aftermath of a tragedy.In the main role, Maja, Justyna Wasilewska, is emotionally naked and intense in her grief, yet also full of dazzling wit and vivacity. But Mundruczo surrounds her with six actors whose extraordinary performances make this a true ensemble piece. There is Dobromir Dymecki as Maja’s charming engineer husband, Lars, who, afraid to confront his grief head-on, lapses into immaturity and inappropriate behavior. There is Magdalena Kuta as Maja’s stern foster mother, who has invited a lawyer relative (Marta Scislowicz, who is more cautious than calculating) in hopes of convincing Maja to take legal action against the midwife. For all the sharp words, machinations and recriminations, the extended scene is neither somber nor bleak. Instead, the serious themes are shot through with humor, pathos and ironic reversals that bring to mind Chekhov or Bergman. When Maja and her competitive stepsister (Agnieszka Zulewska) twirl around the dining room with gymnastic ribbons to the 1980s Italian pop hit “Felicità,” the exuberant moment provides a sort of wordless catharsis. Although Maja has suffered an unimaginable blow, we understand that she’s far from broken: not because she’s moved on, but because she has the fortitude to own her pain. Defiantly, she recognizes her loss, yet refuses to be defined by it.The determination to acknowledge and understand past trauma as a way of moving on from it also animates the work of Annie Ernaux. This French writer has been setting her life down on the page for nearly five decades, in both autobiographical fiction and memoir. Her 2016 coming-of-age memoir “A Girl’s Story” appeared in English in 2020 and introduced American readers to her precise and incandescent style.Dobromir Dymecki (at window), Marta Scislowicz (seen from the back), Agnieszka Zulewska and Magdalena Kuta in “Pieces of a Woman.”Natalia KabanowA new chamber adaptation of the novel at the Residenztheater in Munich, “Erinnerung eines Mädchens” (“Memory of a Girl,” as per the book’s title in German and in French), is directed by the young Italian Silvia Costa, who distributes passages taken verbatim from Ernaux’s memoir among three performers from the theater’s permanent acting ensemble.Sibylle Canonica, Juliane Köhler and Charlotte Schwab each bring slightly different readings to the text and to Ernaux’s half-century-old recollections. The play begins in 1958, when the 18-year-old Annie Duchesne takes a job as a counselor at a summer camp and has her first sexual experiences, including a messy encounter with the older head counselor, with whom she falls in love. Although the tone is often cool and dispassionate, the effect is poetic and intimate as Ernaux investigates the storehouse of her memories with directness, honesty and analytic rigor.The trio of middle-aged actresses whom Costa enlists to narrate Ernaux’s reminiscences suggest not so much a splintering of the self as a multiplication of consciousness. Canonica, Köhler and Schwab move about the intimate black box of the Residenztheater’s smaller stage, the Marstall, performing a near-continuous series of actions. Some, like the frequent costume changes, clearly suggest fluid transitions between time periods and locations; others, such as elaborate rituals involving screens, mirrors, glasses of milk, rocks, string, dirt and clay figures of body parts, hint at the mysterious mechanisms of memory. The production’s powerful coda, in which the actresses enter a hidden photo lab and print a portrait of the young Ernaux (it’s featured on the book’s cover in the United States), suggests that mental recall works like a darkroom where the past can be developed, enlarged and fixed. The staging is delicate, but with a solid structure and rhythm that usher the viewer through the brisk 80-minute production. The way that Costa makes a spoken word performance flow gently and organically is impressive. One of the few missteps is Ayumi Paul’s jarring original score, which occasionally overwhelms the subdued emotions onstage and makes it hard to hear the actresses.From left, Charlotte Schwab, Sibylle Canonica and Juliane Köhler in “Memory of a Girl” at the Residenztheater in Munich.Sandra ThenWatching this show put me in mind of one of the Residenztheater’s best recent productions, Bastian Kraft’s reimagining of “Lulu,” in which Frank Wedekind’s antiheroine was brought to life by three actresses, including Köhler and Schwab. That multiplication made sense, in part, because of the myriad archetypes of womanhood that the character embodies.By contrast, it is difficult to know what the multiple casting in “Memory of a Girl” is meant to convey. It could simply be that Costa wanted to take advantage of the excellent actresses at her disposal. But I wonder if there was a deeper purpose to the way that the director divided the role beyond providing a more dynamic way of bringing the book to the stage than entrusting the text to a single performer.“Am I to dissolve the girl of 1958 and the woman of 2014 into a single ‘I’?” Ernaux wonders in “Memory of a Girl.” The interrogation of a splintered or dissociated consciousness may appear to be uniquely suited to the art of writing. Yet Costa, like Mundruzco, finds eminently theatrical means to make us understand a woman who is broken and made whole again.Pieces of a Woman. Directed by Kornel Mundruzco. In repertory at TR Warszawa in Warsaw.Memory of a Girl. Directed by Silvia Costa. Through Dec. 28 at the Residenztheater Munich. More

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      Vanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares Her

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyVanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares HerFor her first lead in a film, the actress wanted a character as challenging as many of those she’s played onstage. She found it in Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”“Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix, is the first lead film role for the actress Vanessa Kirby.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.Credit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixCredit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixIn September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.The experience of watching that six hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of shooting the film.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAnd she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”Left to right: the actress Ellen Burstyn, the director Kornel Mundruczo, and Kirby in a scene from “Pieces of a Woman.” Credit…Philippe Bosse/NetflixKirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.Credit…Alex Bailey/NetflixCredit…Chiabella James/Paramount PicturesEven as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.Kirby said she found that women who had experienced pregnancy loss were “actually really relieved” to talk about it.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIn recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World To Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More