Review: Heartbreak Hotel (Soho Theatre)

Review by Harry Bower

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Can you really quantify heartbreak? Can you map out the neurology of grief like a textbook case study, and still feel the emotional gut punch when it inevitably arrives? Heartbreak Hotel, now playing at Soho Theatre, doesn’t just attempt to answer these questions…It invites you to live through them. A short and sharp but emotionally loaded 75 minutes, this is a breakup play like no other: sharp, clinical, lyrical, and brutally honest.

The premise is simple. Its execution is anything but. Karin McCracken plays our narrator, guide, and protagonist, a person caught in the slow, looping heartbreak of a relationship gone wrong. Through a direct address that blends science lecture with spoken memoir, she unpicks the messy neurology of heartbreak. The dopamine highs, the cortisol crashes, the maddening memory loops. And then, just when you think you've got a handle on it, she steps fully into the skin of someone enduring it in real time. What starts as an intellectual dissection of grief becomes something deeply and dangerously vulnerable. And it hits hard.

Eleanor Bishop’s direction is as precise, honest, and unshowy as the writing itself, resisting any temptation toward melodrama. Every movement counts, and every still moment lingers. The wrap-around tickertape LED screens framing the stage pulse with each new ‘stage’ of grief, ticking us forward like emotional chapter markers. It's a clever and quietly devastating use of space, maximising the intimacy of the Soho Theatre’s upstairs room. Props are minimal, transitions are smooth, and there’s a constant hum of curiosity about where we’ll go next, even if we know, in our hearts, how it will all end.

The writing is a revelation. This is not just good relationship writing; it is some of the most naturalistic, resonant dialogue you’ll hear on stage. Conversations feel lifted from your own past; those post-breakup autopsies that play on a loop for years. The script is somehow both specific and universal, profound and familiar. It lets science give structure, but never lets it flatten the feeling. A particular conversation between the two leads about why soulmates still sometimes need to walk away is as painful and clear-eyed as anything you’ll have seen in a breakup drama.

McCracken and Simon Leary are extraordinary. Both actors inhabit their roles with a kind of quiet clarity - never pushing too hard, never underplaying the emotional weight. Their chemistry is so finely tuned that it feels lived-in, not performed. The set mirrors the contradictions of the play. The warm pink carpet becomes a kind of emotional home base, a safe space where vulnerability is allowed. In contrast, the cold metal table and clinical lighting suggest the harsh, unavoidable outside world. 

There is, however, one weak spot. While most of the musical interludes - hauntingly autotuned covers - add atmospheric texture and emotional charge, a few stray. Whether by design or not, these moments occasionally pull us out of the story’s flow. Rather than advancing the emotional arc, they act as pauses, which for me didn’t always land. The intention might be to offer moments of detachment, letting us process the grief, but the risk is that we begin to drift from the narrative.

Still, this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a truly excellent production of a brilliant show. Heartbreak Hotel isn’t about finding closure or moving on. It’s about acknowledging the process - scientific, spiritual, and emotional - and understanding that healing is rarely linear. Packed with insight, tenderness, humour and hope, this is a play that speaks softly but hits deeply. In a world that rushes us to “get over it” and attempts to replace grief with fast (often online) gratification, McCracken dares us to sit in the ache a little longer.

Book a ticket. Then bring tissues, and maybe someone you once loved.

Heartbreak Hotel plays at Soho Theatre until Saturday 23 August 2025.

For more information and tickets, visit: https://sohotheatre.com/events/heartbreak-hotel/ 

Photos by Andi Crown