What actually happens when your heart breaks? A hit play with classic breakup songs unpacks the ‘universal experience’

In 1983, the Japanese doctor Hikaru Sato diagnosed the first medical case of “broken heart syndrome”. Seen in patients after a significant physical or emotional stressor, such as grief, the condition results in a sudden, temporary weakening of the heart’s muscular wall. Sato named it takotsubo cardiomyopathy, because in those with the syndrome the left ventricle of the heart changes to resemble a takotsubo – a Japanese pot traditionally used to catch octopus, with a narrow neck and wide base. “Takotsubo syndrome is like poetry made manifest,” says the writer and actor Karin McCracken. “It’s unbelievable to me that it’s a real thing.” Related: ‘Clinically awful’: why the pain of a broken heart is real McCracken came across the condition during her research for Heartbreak Hotel, a show that is part play, part monologue with no fourth wall, and packed with synth-heavy covers of classic breakup songs. It details the experience of heartbreak – both the psychological and physical impact it can have on the body, of which takotsubo syndrome is an extreme example. After a selling out at last year’s Rising festival in Melbourne and touring internationally, Heartbreak Hotel begins a new Australian tour this week at Arts Centre Melbourne. McCracken, who co-directs the New Zealand contemporary theatre company EBKM with Eleanor Bishop, had wanted to explore the issue of heartbreak, which to her seems “as close to a universal experience as one gets”. “I had been heartbroken for quite a long time and I had found it very difficult to find in culture media that felt both authentic and truthful, and also reassuring,” McCracken says. Much of what she had come across was either “too grim”, without a sense that life would improve after a breakup, or too “happy-clappy-you’ll-meet-someone-else, but it didn’t necessarily feel real”. “So the mandate for me, writing, was: is there a way to strike a chord right down the middle of those two things?” There are scientifically documented b…