Crime

The Astrakhan Coat by Pauline Macaulay. No Broadway season would be complete without someone suggesting that what the theater really needs is a good new mystery thriller. Perhaps it does, but The Astrakhan Coat is not very good, only superficially new, and never particularly thrilling. Even avid whodunit fans must be a trifle bored by corpses in trunks, corpses that drop out of closets, and the confetti-like strewing of misleading clues. Coat also contains the customary complement of victims whose impenetrable innocence prevents them from knowing when or how to withdraw from transparently treacherous situations.

Coat hangs on a double frame-up. A dumb penguin of a waiter (Roddy Mc-Dowall), who wants to cloak the cipher of his existence with something or other, answers an advertisement for an astra khan coat. The man selling the coat is a criminal dandy (Brian Bedford) of homosexual bent who tyrannizes over his two colleagues, a bizarre, dress-alike brother and sister known as The Heavenly Twins. Diabolic purists who love crime for crime's sake, the three want a fall guy to take the rap on a diamond heist. When the circumstantial evidence is finally planted on the waiter, he bursts into hysterical laughter and ardently proclaims his guilt, as if escaping years of nonentity in a moment of wicked splendor.

In unfolding her perfect crime, British Playwright Macaulay tries hard to be `a la Mod. Her actors, uniformly able, have been directed to play it cool and campy, while tossing off supposedly chic little references to existentialism. They perform with the cheery abandon of those who see a closing notice looming in the immediate future.

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