There is something quietly affecting about celebrating friendship. Romantic love and family relationships have long provided the dramatic fuel for theatre, while the friendships that sustain us through childhood, adolescence and adulthood are often relegated to the sidelines. Liv Satchell’s Ballkids (or, scenes from a friendship) puts friendship centre stage, and does so with considerable wit, tenderness and emotional intelligence.
An award-winning hit of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, where it was nominated for Best Theatre and won Best New Writing, Ballkids subsequently took out the 2024 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights’ Award. It was also nominated for Best Production at the 2025 Green Room Awards, with Satchell winning Best New Writing for Independent Theatre. Yet for all its accolades, this is a play that feels remarkably unaffected by its success. Its focus remains firmly on two people and the complicated, sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful business of growing up together.
Holly and Sam share a modest but highly specific dream: to become ball kids at the Australian Open. On their first day of training, neither knows they won’t make the elite squad. More importantly, neither knows they are about to meet the person who will become their best friend.
From that seemingly ordinary encounter, Satchell constructs an inventive portrait of a friendship spanning two decades. The play moves chronologically through Holly and Sam’s shared history, tracing the friendship as it develops and changes over time.
Rather than simply recounting one life event after another, however, Satchell shapes the story through a series of sharply observed scenes, allowing moments from their lives to accumulate into a revealing portrait of friendship, memory and growing up.
The effect is something like rummaging through the photographic album of a friendship, where the gaps between the images can sometimes tell us as much as the pictures themselves. It is a smart theatrical device, allowing Satchell to explore not simply what happens to these women, but how friendships change as the people within them do.
There are moments of joy and absurdity, awkwardness and disappointment, intimacy and distance. The comedy is often sharply observed, while the more poignant passages are allowed to emerge without excessive manipulation.
Under the assured direction of Julian Dibley-Hall, Izabella Yena and Mich McCowage deliver impressive performances as Sam and Holly. Their chemistry is central to the production’s success. They capture the easy familiarity of two people who have known each other for years, while also revealing the tensions, misunderstandings and unspoken expectations that can accumulate within even the closest friendship.
Some of the production’s most affecting moments come through its restraint. Silence is used with particular sensitivity, allowing a pause, a look or a shared physical moment to carry considerable emotional weight. There is a lovely confidence in allowing the audience to sit with these moments rather than explaining them.
The production is impeccably realised. Filipe Filihia’s set design immediately places us in the world of tennis, but its purpose extends well beyond establishing the sporting environment. A scoreboard of sorts becomes an ingenious theatrical device, prefacing each scene with a thematic cue while marking the ritual progression of time. The changing year and the ages of Holly and Sam are clearly and economically registered, allowing the audience to track their journey across two decades without interrupting the play’s fluid structure.
John Collopy’s lighting and Tom Backhaus’s sound work together to create a fluid theatrical world capable of accommodating the play’s frequent shifts in time and place. Xanthe Beesley’s choreography and movement direction is another highlight, adding a physical vocabulary that helps articulate the rhythms of the friendship itself.
Importantly, Ballkids never suggests that friendship is uncomplicated. Quite the opposite. Satchell recognises that the people who know us best can also be the people capable of hurting us most. Friendships can endure enormous change, but they can also fracture, evolve or simply become something different from what they once were.
That complexity gives the play its emotional resonance. Beneath the humour and inventive structure is an affecting ode to lonely kids and to the extraordinary discovery that comes when two people find each other and realise they don’t have to navigate the world quite so alone.
There is also a welcome generosity in Ballkids. It understands the silliness of friendship, its rituals and private languages, its occasional selfishness and its extraordinary capacity for loyalty. Most of all, it understands that a best friend can become part of the architecture of a life.
Funny, inventive and genuinely moving, Ballkids makes a persuasive case for friendship as one of the great, and often underappreciated, forms of human connection. It is an assured piece of contemporary Australian theatre, beautifully performed and realised
Ballkids (or, scenes from a friendship)
Theatre – fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Performance: Thursday 17 September 2026
Season continues to 24 September 2026
Information and Bookings: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com
Images: Izabella Yena and Mich McCowage – photo by Darren Gill | Mich McCowage photo by Darren Gill | Izabella Yena – photo by Darren Gill | Izabella Yena and Mich McCowage – photo by Darren Gill | Mich McCowage and Izabella Yena – photo by Darren Gill
Review: Rohan Shearn
Note: Audiences should also take the time to visit The Friendship Map before or after the performance – the installation invites audiences to read other people’s stories of friendship and contribute their own.