Of heroines and heroes

Press, 3 September 1986, Page 18

Of heroines and heroes

By

LEE MATTHEWS

Mills and Boon stories, cowboy westerns, commando comics and hospital romances hotchpotch, together in Rachel McAlpine’s latest play, “An Exceedingly Popular Play.”

The mind boggles at what the hero will be like. A tall dark, machine gun toting cowboy skilled in brain surgery, perhaps? The heroine — alabastar skin, red-gold hair and a fringed, leather cowgirl shirt with a thermometer tucked casually in the pocket?

McAlpine, who is the writer in residence at the University of Canterbury, says she chose these most “sneered at” of genres because people read them, and read them ardently.

She discovered the world of happy endings while living in Golden Bay, away from libraries and so-called good literature.

"I entered the world of second hand bookshops, and found out what people were reading,” she said.

Local literary tastes ran to shelves of battered Mills and Boon and hospital romances, bargain bins of dog-eared westems and cut-price comics

rolled into rubber-banded tubes. She read “several sacks” of these books and found the contempt with which people treated them and their readers interesting. “People watch trash on television every day of their lives. All things considered, I don’t think the human race is going to go down the drain because of a few Mills and Boon!”

The play is a parody from start to finish. McAlpine says she hopes it will be as much fun to watch as it was to write.

“I play whoopdedoo with the stereotypes,” she grins. Women are made the dominant types and men have the gentle characteristics usually given to women.

Does this mean our ti-tian-haired heroine clumps to the operating table in commando boots? Or that our hero nurtures a secret yen for bed-pans? McAlpine smiles and says one character in the play is half — “the top half’ — of a philosophical horse called Midnight. Other characters are subject to change with very little notice, it seems.

“An Exceedingly Popular Play” will be performed by the University’s Drama Society at the Ngaio Marsh Theatre from September 13.