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SCENE IT: THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES, installation art meets philanthropy
- Barbara Loots
- Mar 22
- 5 min read
Barbara Loots
Created and performed by Lara van Huyssteen, audiences can see THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES at the Homecoming Centre for a short run until 23 March 2025. Profits made will be donated to charities who work towards purchasing shoes for the children from the Blanco Township in George.
As a performance experience, THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES professes to offer a moment of remembrance to the lost South Africans who fought for our freedom. It delivers on that promise of remembrance in a well thought out and considered manner, but not within the format of a performance in the theatrical sense.
In terms of style, THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES hovers somewhere between a museum exhibition and installation art.
The primary focus is the introduction of four repositories from South Africa's apartheid struggle: an axe, an eviction notice, a passbook and a camera. Through recorded voices these repositories share their first-hand accounts of atrocities with the audience, in a similar way that you would encounter when walking through a museum with an audio guide. For at least 45 minutes of the 60 minute runtime, you do not hear from the creator and performer, Lara van Huyssteen, apart from a few songs beautifully sang while setting up the moment where the passbook’s horrific past takes the spotlight. She walks through a set that gives the feeling of a museum exhibition being set up, tinkering with the building of a box in the upstage left corner for most of the show.
Though the subject matter of apartheid itself still holds space in our reality (especially if one reflects on what is happening in Gaza at the moment), the production itself feels to be more of an information session than theatrical experience.
Van Huyssteen describes the production as an intermixing of verbatim text and narrative storytelling. The recorded narratives are not well presented. To elevate those to a profesional theatrical standard the voices lent to it would need to be carefully directed for the recordings to fall in the realm of the type of storytelling one would associate with a play. At present these vocal elements are of the standard of free access audio books (at best) or WhatsApp voice notes (at worst) –with some of the recorded voices (specifically that resembling the axe) playing better than others who stumble over words and sound breathy and not properly guided as to the use of dramatic pauses.
Van Huyssteen’s final monologue, which she performs herself with the use of an often-played speech by struggle stalwart and former President Nelson Mandela, draws on an emotional personal memory. Though the personal aspect adds to the mentioned heart, her delivery needs a deft directorial hand to guide it into the realm of an elevated theatrical performance. She comes across as nervous, not allowing any nuance to amplify the impact of her delivery. The mentioned recorded speech has also often been used by many an artists when trying to emotionally manipulate an audience to focus on the importance of the topic in an attempt to stifle any criticism of the production value of a play. I am not saying that such manipulation was Van Huyssteen’s intention –to the contrary, I think she added it in an attempt to ground the production with a moment of gravitas. However, as she professes in the production, she is from the born free generation and, because it is such a profound historical clip for her generation, she may not be fully alive to the fact that such a historic moment may ring differently to a broader audience, many of which could have a lived experience linked to the life and times of Mandela. I also think the production will sit differently when performed in London (where it has historic interest) as opposed to Cape Town (where it links to the lived reality for many) –my suspicion being that the way it is packaged will be better received in the former.
This all may sound harsh, but I say this because I am critiquing what I thought would be a theatre production. If Van Huyssteen’s intention is for THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES to read as a fully fledged theatrical experience, I think she is missing out on the opportunity to engage with the real story at the core of it all: The story of the boy from the poor side of town who begs for coins and has no shoes. That is a story that pleads to be told; that is the story that can be made to soar to a theatrical level if properly unpacked and packaged to take an audience on a journey of the struggles of a small boy who even after the dawn of democracy still lives weighed down by the albatross of inequality. However, in its current format THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES reads as a historical overview culminating in a confessional of privilege and associated guilt that brings the audience no closer to connecting with the real human interest element, namely the young shoeless boy (and may others like him).
In THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES the boy sadly only features for but a moment's mention at the end, after the audience has metaphorically walked through an apartheids museum. The production has no performance component that truly links anything together in the way of a cohesive narrative, the only connecting point being the theme of apartheid. What the audience is actually treated to is moments caught in time immemorial. And though those moments hold great importance for the humanity and soul of our rainbow nation, I cannot regard it (in the format of this production) as theatre.
What I think it is –and perhaps the show has not been reflected upon as such by Van Huyssteen– is a product that is leaning towards the realm of site-specific interventions and installations. The product on stage would have great evocative impact if placed somewhere where people can interact with it as art. I think Van Huyssteen would benefit from reflecting on the work of interdisciplinary artists of the calibre of James Webb, and see how she can make the switch from theatre to installation art, with the latter allowiing for a clear and strong reference point to merge with artistic expression. Such art communicates the idea of or message associated with physical pieces (where objects such as the repositories in the production can then regarded as a collection with a central theme or belief). Art so conceived is often elevated through (mostly recorded) spoken word. The approach of occasionally incorporating spoken word has for example been very successfully used by Webb who often collaborates with playwrights and actors in staging his art exhibitions. This looks to be the type of artistic setting where Van Huyssteen's talents and philantropic vision could merge and be amplified to produce humanity informed work of great artistic value.
THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES is an ode to those that lost all and deserve to be remembered. It is clearly fueled by Van Huyssteen’s experience as a born free performer who struggles with the inequality that is still visible all around us since the dawn of our democracy in 1994. The production has heart, and her heart is definitely in the right place, but theatre per se it is not. If Van Huyssteen delves a bit deeper into the different forms of artistic expression, she may find that there is a way of elevating this passion project in a manner that gives it proper wings.
You can see THAT BOY HAS NO SHOES onstage at the Homecoming Centre until 23 March 2025. It carries an age restriction of 12, with the following content warining: A prolonged blackout, loud noises and audio descriptions of racism, violence and death. Viewers may be disturbed by sensitive imagery. Tickets can be booked online through Webtickets.