Editor’s Note: Roman Polanski’s horror movie The Tenant premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 1976. Michael Freeman takes a look back at the novel by French author Roland Topor, Le Locataire Chimérique, and the book’s journey to film and, most recently, a surreal ballet.
By Michael Freeman
In 2018, BroadwayWorld announced that ballet artist James Whiteside would star in a new production that involves a unique theme in the world of ballet: horror.
That production, The Tenant, was performed at The Joyce Theater in New York City in November 2018.
Directed by London choreographer Arthur Pita, Whiteside took his audience on a disturbing journey as he played the lead role of Trelkovsky, a man who rents a room in a Paris apartment building after the previous tenant, a woman named Simone Choule, committed suicide by jumping out the window. He slowly comes to believe there’s a plot to drive him to suicide as well.
Ballet and … horror? Absolutely. But isn’t ballet about Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and cute stuff like that? Sometimes.
This ballet was an adaptation of the novel Le Locataire Chimérique, (published in the U.S. and UK as The Tenant) by French author Roland Topor, and what’s fascinating about the idea of this Edgar Allen Poe-like horror story being adapted for ballet is that in 2017, Topor’s novel was adapted …. as an opera. Der Mieter, an opera by composer Arnulf Herrmann, was performed at Oper Frankfurt in Germany.
And a year earlier in July 2016, Iranian director Setareh Aminian staged an adaptation of Topor’s novel in Tehran at Hafez Hall. Aminian staged the play in collaboration with Réformances, a Paris-based company.
And in August 2011, the theater group Woodshed Collective staged their own version of the Topor book as a site-specific performance piece done on five floors of a historic church and parish house in Manhattan, where patrons could wander from floor to floor, and room to room, at their own pace, exploring different stories about the characters in Topor’s book. While that included Trelkovsky, six playwrights created their own separate mini-plays about the other tenants living in that Paris apartment.
Why has Topor’s decades-old novel, originally published in 1964, proven to be such catnip for a diverse number of live performances and artistic factions? What is it about the saga of the tormented everyman Trelkovsky that keeps attracting new interpretations?
It could be a sign of how universal Topor’s tale of alienation, exile and social conformity still feels today.
What Is Roland Topor’s Book About?
“Trelkovsky was on the point of being thrown out in the street when his friend Simon told him about an apartment on the rue des Pyrenees. He went to look at it. The concierge, an ill-tempered woman, refused to show it to him, but a thousand franc note changed her mind. ‘Follow me,’ she said then, without altering her surly attitude.”
So begins the English-language version of the book, which follows the French/Jewish everyman Trelkovsky, so desperately in need of an apartment that he ignores the fact that the previous tenant threw herself out the window.
Shy and mild-mannered, Trelkovsky is so excited about his new digs that he has a housewarming party with some friends and coworkers to celebrate. That’s when his troubles begin. Suddenly he’s the object of rude complaints by his neighbors, who grumble that he’s noisy and has become a troublemaker.
Even the landlord, Monsieur Z, makes it clear that if he gets any more complaints, he’ll take steps to correct the situation (i.e., eviction). Poor Trelkovsky develops a tremendous sense of unease from the hostile neighbors, and from odd mysteries in the building. Trelkovsky’s window looks directly onto the communal water closet, and the tenant often notices people standing in the toilet, motionless and expressionless, for hours. After he spills some garbage on the stairs, he dumps most of it in the courtyard trash cans, then races back up to clean his mess — and finds someone else has already done so.
Trelkovsky also discovers a strange connection with the previous tenant, Simone. The café owner across the street, who knew Simone, keeps serving Trelkovsky the hot chocolate she drank every morning, rather than coffee. The concierge gives him her mail, while the landlord insists he wear slippers at night, as Simone did, because he’ll be quieter that way.
As Trelkovsky becomes more and more alienated from his neighbors, he starts to suspect something sinister might have happened — that maybe Simone didn’t commit suicide at all, but was pushed or thrown out the window.
And he begins to fear that his neighbors might now be plotting to do the same thing to him.
The book is dark, conspiratorial, and quite unnerving, with plenty of strong shivers along the way, in no small measure because its mood of surreal paranoia is so convincing. We’re never quite sure if Trelkovsky is imaging that his neighbors have a plot against him — or if it’s true.
Roman Polanski brilliantly captured that paranoid atmosphere in his 1976 cinematic adaptation of the Topor book, the first time it was adapted to another medium. Polanski himself played Trelkovsky, and expertly captured the pitch dark humor that was part of Topor’s clever writing style, while at the same time tossing the audience into a black hole where everything happening is either obsessive delusions — or persecution.
No wonder this book continues to inspire artists who use it to raise questions about the maltreatment, abuse and harassment of those who fail to conform.
What Other Themes Are Prominent in the Book?
Alienation and exile from “the crowd at large” are major themes in both the Topor novel and the Polanski film. Trelkovsky feels like he’s been shut out of society altogether. And the theme isn’t surprising to anyone who knows Topor’s history. The author was born in 1938 in Paris, to a Jewish family of Polish origin. After the Nazi conquest of France in 1940 and the Vichy puppet government that came into power and began sending French Jews to the Nazi concentration camps, the Topor family had to go into hiding to survive. Their own landlady reported the family to the SS; if a sympathetic neighbor hadn’t tipped them off, the entire Topor family could have been sent to the gas chambers. Quite a start to life.
In an article about Topor published in Time Out, writer Nicholas Royle noted that Topor’s harrowing childhood almost certainly contributed to the dark and ominous themes he explored in The Tenant.
“Trouble with neighbors had been present right from the very beginning,” Royle wrote. “The novel is a tour de force of urban paranoia, although Topor, realizing the potency of ambiguity, keeps us guessing: does the victimization take place in Trelkovsky’s head, or are the neighbors really out to get him?”
As Royle noted, Topor, his sister and their parents, Polish Jewish refugees, lived on rue Jacques-Louvel-Tessier in Paris. “This is where all the trouble with neighbors began, when fellow residents denounced the family as Jewish,” Royle wrote. “Roland’s father was forced into hiding and the children were sent away outside of Paris.”
Life imitating art?
The Enduring Legacy of The Tenant
Clearly, one doesn’t have to be Jewish, French or a Holocaust survivor to feel deeply moved by the novel’s portrait of social estrangement and separation (Polanski is also Jewish, living in Paris and of Polish descent). Trelkovsky’s story speaks volumes to anyone who’s ever felt rejected by their community for not “fitting in,” unwanted in their chosen city.
And that kind of harassment leads to something else: unbearable isolation. Trelkovsky experiences the pain of loneliness, which is something more than a few of us have undergone at some point in our lives.
And that may be why Topor’s book continues to fascinate and inspire artists — whether their medium is film, theater, opera or ballet.
They intrinsically know how many members of the audience at one time or another have felt like a Trelkovsky stepping into that claustrophobic apartment, feeling trapped in there, and sensing the spider closing in on the web ….
Michael Freeman is an Orlando journalist, playwright and author of the terrifying book “Bloody Rabbit”. Contact him at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.
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