Theatre review: Secret Ingredients is a sweet experiment in human connection and the pains of speaking honestly
Keely Rois O’Brien’s season opener at Gateway Theatre has a simple message: if you don’t know how to say it, say it with cake
Secret Ingredients. Photo by Reagan Jade
Secret Ingredients runs to October 17 at Gateway Theatre. Performances are sold out
WHETHER YOU’RE CONFESSING to your best friend that you actually want to date them, telling your upstairs neighbour they’re too damn loud, or asking your ex to tell their mom to stop texting you, some things are just too hard to say face to face.
Sometimes, you need to say it with cake.
This was the idea that inspired Richmond-based interdisciplinary artist Keely Rois O’Brien to develop Secret Ingredients, an experimental theatre performance that makes colourful cakes the medium for sharing messages too hard to simply say out loud.
Opening Gateway Theatre’s 2026–27 season, Secret Ingredients has taken over Studio B and replaced the traditional audience setup with an intimate cluster of dining tables, all draped in pink and green gingham tablecloths. Decorating the tables are small vases holding delicate bouquets, long, white taper candles, teeny-tiny forks, and golden napkins—not unlike what you’d see at a high tea.
Not typical of an afternoon tea, however, is (1) a print-out colour wheel at every seat, dedicating different emotions to different flavours, and (2), in the centre of each table, a butter dish full of slips of paper.
“I had this idea that if there was something you were struggling to say to someone in your life, it would be helpful to have a cake messaging service that could deliver those messages,” O’Brien says at the top of the show.
She then explains how, despite not being a professional baker, she decided to launch a free cake delivery service in which strangers could fill out a Google Form and share a message they needed to tell someone in their life. The emotions expressed on the form would inform the flavours O’Brien chose for the cakes. For example, a bitter dark-chocolate ganache might symbolize an apology someone is still waiting for; a punchy ginger sponge might indicate a grievance needing to be dealt with; or a sweet and salted caramel drizzle might be chosen to represent a love so strong that it makes you cry to think about losing it.
To date, O’Brien has received 110 submissions and delivered 19 cakes.
Behind her, a slide show flicks through images of completed cakes. Confessions, ranging from ‘You snore’ to ‘I want to jump your bones’ to ‘I don’t know how to exist on earth without you,’ sit atop the cakes in a loopy handwritten frosting. At the tables, bite-sized pieces of replica cakes are shared, inviting the audience in on the experience. Can you taste the annoyance in this one? Does the devotion come through in this bite?
Creating pieces of experimental theatre based on human connection is something O’Brien has dedicated her craft to for over 10 years. In 2018, her Perfect Strangers project (created with June Fukumura under their creative partnership Popcorn Galaxies) paired strangers in the audience and sent them through a walk in a neighbourhood to get to know each other, prompting them with increasingly more personal questions along the way and asking them to record their journey with Post-Its. Then, in 2020, O’Brien presented The Dead Letter Office, originally commissioned by Upintheair Theatre, which, through participatory letter writing, invited audience members to consider: “Who have you lost touch with and what would you write to them if you could?”
In Secret Ingredients, O’Brien encourages the audience to consider whether they have been meaning to say something to someone but may need a cake to do so. The blank slips of paper in the butter dishes are filled out, and by the end of the show, a new cake delivery has been ordered.
First developed through Theatre Replacement’s COLLIDER artist residency, Secret Ingredients premiered at the HOLD ON LET GO festival in 2025 and has since travelled to Halifax, Whitehorse, and Toronto. Next month, it will travel to Victoria for Intrepid Theatre’s Incoming Festival.
If I could bake this show into a cake, it would be a rich, moist, layer cake with a bright and sugary-sweet frosting. 
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