Heartbreak, Hysteria, and the Anatomy of Letting Go

Some performances don’t just sit in your mind—they lodge under your skin.Heartbreak Hotel was one of them.

Last week I went to see a two-person show at Arts Centre Melbourne. It was funny, haunting, raw, and entirely too familiar. The kind of familiar that makes you shift in your seat, because the story unfolding on stage isn’t just theatre—it’s memory. It’s yours.

Created by Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCracken, and performed by McCracken alongside Simon Leary, Heartbreak Hotel is an Edinburgh Fringe favourite for a reason. It’s vulnerable without pity, sharp without losing warmth, and immersive in a way that leaves you gasping between laughs. It takes heartbreak—the real, unglamorous kind—and drags it out under fluorescent lights, showing us all its cellular, psychological, and hysterical components. And I use the word hysterical deliberately.

I walked into the theatre prepared for a performance. What I experienced was far more intimate, more dissected than most gallery openings or paint-stained afternoons in the studio. This wasn’t just a story about breaking up. This was a dissection. A post-mortem of love. A live, bleeding autopsy of emotional survival, laid bare beneath stage lights and breakup songs—while doing the taxes.

Karin McCracken, dressed in lavender fringe and heartbreak, carried the show with aching precision. Elvis and Celine played backup as she guided us through the wreckage left behind when love collapses—but more than that, through the absurdity of trying to explain that collapse to others. Or worse—having it explained to you.

Source: Arts Centre Melbourne

There’s a moment in the show where she’s simply making tacos. Alone. And it felt like someone dropped a weight in my chest. That moment—that mundanity—hit harder than any monologue. Because I’ve been that woman in the kitchen. Asked to stay soft and nurturing while my ribs were splintering under the weight of someone else's comfort. I’ve been the safe place someone ran to—while insisting I wasn’t where they wanted to stay.

As an artist, I saw the production in brushstrokes. Each scene another shade of grief. Humour flickering like light across the canvas. The set was minimal, clinical at times—but the lighting wrapped around her like breath, shifting between memory and melancholy. At times we were inside her mind, her cells, her need to make sense of pain. That need? That’s where it pierced deepest.

Because that need has lived in me, too. The need to understand someone who says, “You’re my soulmate,” while rejecting your existence. Who clings to your warmth while denying the connection it demands. That tug-of-war between logic and longing—where women are called hysterical for needing clarity, while men refuse to let go.

There’s a line in the show. A text from an ex, seven months post-breakup:“What are we?”It was meant to be absurd. Tragicomic. Poetic.But for me, it was a punch.Because I’ve had that message. I’ve read it. I’ve bled under its weight.

That’s not love. It’s ownership disguised as confusion.

Heartbreak Hotel reminded me that healing isn’t just something we do. It’s something we fight for. It’s rage, ritual, and survival. It’s art. Messy, minimalist, human.

This play was funny. And it was brilliant. But more than that, it was liberating.Because like all good art, it reminded us:We are not alone.We are not crazy.We are simply tired of being used, dismissed, and told to smile through it.

Heartbreak Hotel isn’t just a show. It’s a permission slip—for women to stop apologising for their grief.

And for me? That is everything.