Screen to stage comebacks face critical scepticism because the stars’ popularity generates full houses whereas the theatrical product fails to equal the best standards in the art but, since most of the fans don’t watch theatre, they know no better. This fate befell Roopkatha Rangmanch’s Lā-ilāj (incorrectly calligraphed as LA ilaaj), helmed by Pankaj Tripathi and presented by Anamika Kala Sangam. It did not surprise me to see many of AKS’s discerning senior members, accustomed to high quality in plays supported by AKS of yore, stream out of Kala Mandir after an hour of tolerating the dumbed-down content that finally consumed 150 minutes.
Unpardonably for such a big-budget production, it clearly did not have a tech rehearsal. Consequently, the sound mixing and volume were so deplorably unprofessional that voices boomed and fed-back beyond belief, rendering most of the dialogue incomprehensible. On top of that, the loud acting (pretending to be folksy) distorted the balance even further. In fact, the cast (many ex-NSD) should have returned to the basics of their theatre training and done without mikeing.
Writer-director Faiz Mohammed Khan’s poor script tried to turn a formulaic romantic triangle into a rather late call for female empowerment, with domestic violence and attempted suicide tossed in. The simplistic plotting and low farce prompt me to suggest that he should educate himself by reading contemporary American musicals to realize how far the genre has progressed. Only at the fag end did Lā-ilāj pick up, when the heroine unexpectedly left to lead her own life, but by that time half the audience had also left.
The hallmark of hackneyed direction came with umbrellas in the rain, which everybody in Indian theatre resorts to nowadays when they run out of visual ideas. On the plus side, we heard strong music and collective singing, most prominently by Omkar Patil as the dulcet hero. On the other hand, his band party that formed the nucleus of the story illogically excluded the obligatory brass section, except for a trumpet that nobody played, but at least it served as the prop for a joke at Trump’s expense in the otherwise tasteless humour.
(25 April 2026)