Sandel is a staging of Angus Stewart’s cult novel depicting the relationship between a nineteen-year-old student and a fourteen-year-old choirboy.

By Patrick Cash

Adapted and directed by Glenn Chandler, it benefits from an intelligent script, well-fleshed out characters and, as has become par-for-the-course with the Stag, excellent acting – particularly in the case of Ashley Cousins as the eponymous Antony Sandel. However, morally, it treads a fine tightrope.

Such is the case of art that it should challenge social boundaries, but those social boundaries are sometimes invested with an emotional truth. The physical separation of the boys in question of five years is hardly relevant in terms of an extended relationship – if this was to last a decade, no one would blink at a 24-year-old and a 29-year-old together in Soho.

However, as it is presented upon the stage, the Oxford student David Rogers (a solid Joseph Lindoe) is depicted to be attracted to Antony Sandel because he is a boy and not a man; at one point Cousins as Sandel delivers a line making explicit the lack of hair on his body. Admittedly, later the boy is shown to have grown, but Rogers’ previous love for a younger boy at his school – forever immortalised in precarious adolescence within a photograph – which haunts the gaps in this new bond, suggests the ephemeral rather than the lasting.

Presumably Sandel, in its novel form, was an influence upon Alexander’s Choice, a self-published book QX was sent to review last year, which holds much the same central plot; a young man and a pubescent boy falling for one another. And there is much debate to be provoked on how far we should police the sexuality and agency of teenagers. In my review of Alexander’s Choice, I mentioned the case of teacher Jeremy Forrest who ran off with his 15-year-old girl lover, a case that appears mentioned in the programme of this play. But then the girl there quite clearly had breasts; she had the body of a woman.

It is odd then that in both Alexander’s Choice and Sandel the teenager in question is painted very vividly as having reached sexual, but not physical, maturity. They still look like children. And ultimately, surely this is the very saddest element of pederasty – that a relationship built on this aesthetic physicality is a thing of transience. Boys, inevitably, will always grow up.

Yet, as a theatrical production Sandel was eminently engaging to watch, and as art, it provoked and questioned social mores.

QX rating: ****