Heather Valentine – Train Cake

Train Cake is a parody of blockbuster thrillers, following a retired baker who comes out of retirement after her sourdough starter is brutally kidnapped by an old employer. Our main character, nicknamed Lucky, used to be the creator of the best children’s birthday cakes in Australia, but has since settled into a quiet, peaceful life as a baker of bread. 

This show makes heavy use of AV, with a significant portion of the action playing out in pre-recorded scenes projected behind Valentine on stage. While these scenes were fun, largely featuring sentient cakes who looked right out of a Women’s Weekly cookbook, it ultimately felt like there was an overreliance on recorded video. There were some fun moments where Valentine played against the screen, but the whole show felt unbalanced. 

There were also some unfortunate uses of accents that made me squirm. Specifically, the main villain of the piece speaks in what is meant to be an affected, lispy upper-class Australian accent, intended by the artists to be a spoof of Ita Buttrose. Unfortunately, the execution meant that this choice erred into a mockery of speech differences. This was clearly not intentional on the part of Valentine or the team, but nonetheless: it crossed into the territory of unfortunate and unintended ableism. This is part of a much larger conversation about when, if ever, it’s appropriate to mock things like speech and movement differences. Even if the person under fire is someone we dislike, how does this spoof affect the rest of the people who live with this trait? Where do we draw the line? I don’t have a universal answer, and can only speak on my experience with this specific example. For me, it danced far too close to that line

The concept of this show is absolutely great fun, and I know that there’s an audience for it out there. Unfortunately, as someone who does not feel particularly connected to either action blockbusters or Women’s Weekly Cakes, the overwhelmingly referential humour fell flat. Valentine is a committed performer, and you could feel the passion on-stage. With some reworking, this show could be excellent, and I hope that if it ever has a return season then some of the kinks will be ironed out.