Our job is to constantly challenge. Tell theatre groups this isn’t good enough. We don’t want Dinyar Contractor; he has his own audience elsewhere. Feroz Khan, yes. That’s box office, but there’s quality there

[Sanjna Kapoor]

I hate cricket," says Sanjna Kapoor, looking around at the match in progress. "All of us hate cricket: Kunal, Karan and me. That’s always been Dad’s woe. That mother produced children who hated the game." Dad (Shashi Kapoor to you and me), of course, loves the game, and there he is in the commentator’s box, giving us a laconic (and humorous) description of the match.

But even Sanjna and Kunal and Karan forget their antipathy to the doings of "22 flannelled fools" once a year, because what’s unfolding itself before us is more, much more than a game. This is theatre and anything to do with theatre has the Kapoor clan in thrall. During every Prithvi Theatre Festival, the Prithvi Players take on the Film Valas XI . Since this is the 21st festival, this is the 21st match; but over the years, the dramatis personae have changed: Film Valas, Shashi Kapoor’s movie company, no longer exists. Now Prithvi Players take on the sponsors, so some of the young, lean men (and not so lean, not so young men) on the field must be from Orange, the mobile phone people and ICICI Bank, the money people.