REVIEW: Shock Treatment, Kings Head Theatre ✭✭✭

Richard O'Brien's Shock Treatment at the King's Head Theatre

Julie Atherton can play dowdy geek character, svelte seductive siren, and camp fetish magnet (complete with vinyl Nurse’s outfit just covering her pert derrière and barely containing her heaving bosom) seamlessly, as part of the one character. Atherton’s performance encapsulates the underlying promise of the piece: Geeks and Outsiders can have sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll too! So too do the two other magnetic, but polar opposite, performances of totally committed seductive power. Ben Kerr is hilariously straight as Brad, the quiet, slightly dull husband of Janet with the body of a Greek God and Mateo Oxley milks every comic nanosecond in his turn as the outrageously camp, one-foot-leaping-out-of-the-closet Ralph Hapschatt.