Like an Inside Out for melancholic adults, Heartbreak Hotel is a luminous journey through the anatomy of a heartbreak: atomising the touchpoints of a relationship breakdown into charming, palpable vignettes of life that manage to tell a still-waters-run-deep kind of story beneath its organic dialogue and superbly inhabited acting. 

I am always sceptical about how easy it is to wear down an audience in a 75 minute runtime. Alas, in the Old Lab at Summerhall the other afternoon, I found myself defenceless against some of the best storytelling I’ve seen in a long time. 

A two hander between Karin McCracken and Simon Leary enthrals from a really stylish place – perhaps absurd and self deprecating enough to be impermeable. Or so I thought. The surreal, sultry, in-on-the-joke soundscape was an incantation that cast a rawness over the intimate audience. Guards down, unsuspecting, the tendrils of a bitter heartache latched themselves surreptitiously into the bodies in the room. A quiet promise. A new and abstract place. 

McCracken, with her Susan Sarandon eyes and deadpan yet molasses-resonant tone of voice, anaesthetises the entry wound. I was resisting tears before we reached the second song of the night, a more somber and ethereal rendition of Celine Dion’s “It’s all coming back to me now” than I thought was possible – a song until now I had only ever enjoyed in girly melodrama or laughter. She deftly cleaved the line between protagonist and narrator, a line that blurred the deeper we trod into the story and dispelled the fog obscuring the facts. I was enamoured, in awe, and breathlessly clinging to her every word.

Leary navigates an album of accessory characters with incisive sincerity. It’s rare to follow an actor doubtlessly through such a catalogue of identities, and Leary’s virtuosic undertaking left no room for wondering. He handled layers to his dialogue in a way that made the audience’s voyeuristic role feel so gently considered. The sensitivity to his performance anchored us in credible realities, like flipping through a scrapbook of a life, garnering satisfying impressions from a past boiled down into morsels for our viewing delight.

The set and lighting design serve as artful punctuation – a parentheses, an embrace, a cage, an arena of boundless skies. The black box theatre with the ambience and focus of a glass cloche. Alongside the costuming, the aesthetic elements beguile us into the lucid dream of a seamlessly disjunct narrative, as cosy as a patchwork quilt.

Without revealing too much of my own vulnerability as an audience member, can I call this… transcendental? There are few other words that will do it justice. An example of how powerful excellent writing can be, handled with such finesse, humour and heart. I implore you to go see it. 5 stars. 

I’ve been ticking shows off my list (10 in the last week, ay caramba), balanced around working on up to seven shows a day myself. I’ve seen some stuff I’ve hated, and some promising stuff that could have done with some polishing, but I’m going to stick to my oath and present just what I perceive to be the scrumptious upper echelon. (No one needs to be bored by a tirade against the tiktokers who fancy themselves funny.) My notes app is teeming with revelations, celebrations and discussion points, and as I find pockets of downtime, I’ll tidy them all up for your reading pleasure. And I promise to do so before the season hastens toward its inevitable end and the tickets to the really sensational ones dwindle.

Next up is a review that will forever remain inextricable from one of the greatest moments of my little life: Weather Girl. Talk to you then!