Harry Pleon 46 min read

A hairdresser mysteriously beloved by Aphrodite herself stars in a comic Victorian stage farce.

Harry Pleon's 1893 one-act 'Dicks' Standard Play' is a light theatrical burlesque in which the perfumer Alphonzo Latherem, an inspector, robbers, and the living statue Venus tangle in an hour-and-a-quarter of nonsense. A frothy piece of late-Victorian popular stagecraft, more music-hall than mythology. Read it for a period curiosity: a cheap-and-cheerful comic fantasy written for the amateur stage.

In its time

Published in 1893, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

46 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).