“after a week helen declared that the lessons would conclude, and she drove off to meet her friends in an abandoned parking lot. womanhood”

Šime Knežević’s 2025 play Various Characters approaches with care and confusion the condition of Australian multiculturalism. A coming-of-age tale of multiple teenagers living in socially turbulent mid-2000s Sydney, the play never fully realises its focal point, nor answers the many questions it raises before the curtains close.

“Cell widths shift and distort. The glyphs become increasingly abstract, teetering on the edge of recognition and chaos. This builds on the principle of CAPTCHA. While a bot struggles to decipher distorted letters, we — adept at interpreting characters across diverse fonts and handwriting styles — can navigate and decode them within irregular and unfamiliar contexts.”

“So I’m there, walking around with L0V3 D0ll and she’s wearing these awfully tight shoes and she tells me it’s so she can always remember her bondage or whatever. Some sexbot thing, I thought. They must know she wants to be a model.”

“I want to look as beautiful as my casket.

I want to live forever and be afraid of everything.

Life is so good and it’s only going to get worse.

And in dreams, I don’t have to tuck my wings inside my dress. 

There are angels sitting next to you in the train,

Yet to earn their halo, yet to enter heaven.”

“August 29, 2003. Since 1995, fbi (Free Broadcast Inc) Radio 94.5FM has been broadcast on special occasions, in unlikely places. From an empty shop next to the Clock Hotel in Surry Hills, on milk crates in a caravan in Bondi Beach, or above a suckling pig restaurant on George Street.”

“The fight for Palestine is a fight that everyone must be involved in — the fight against war and imperialism is a fight for a better world for all of us.”

“The play symbol bulges stupidly before the sub-saharan beauty of your jungle. Is heaven nothing but a blank slate? THE END. Play again? What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Here is a gift, do not dwell. Here, a new environment. Let me lead you to a new life. You can always begin again.”

“I wipe it with my other hand to take a deeper look, but it leaves a smear of sheer colour. It looks almost brown. I can feel my eyebrows knit in confusion. I pull my hand to my nose to smell the strange mystery liquid. It smells sweet with a touch of copper.”

“Drawing skeletons on things that should not have skeletons on them has been a mainstay of mine for more than five years now”

“This intensity that morphed into a sense of overwhelm so consuming I felt that nothing could be funnelled into a singular actuality. I let that feeling — whatever it was, consume me.”