A fresh take on heartbreak, this two-hander tackles that mainstay of cultural expression with everything from breakup songs to insights about what brains and bodies go through when relationships end.

Heartbreak Hotel is the creation of Wellington theatre company EBKM’s co-directors: Karin McCracken writes and performs, and Eleanor Bishop directs.

Evidently audiences are embracing their thoughtfully constructed 75-minute theatrical patchwork. It’s toured internationally from London to New York and, after making its Australian debut last year at Rising festival, returns to Arts Centre Melbourne but in a larger theatre.

Karin McCracken and Simon Leary in Heartbreak Hotel. Photo © Andi Crown Photography

Presented before LED panels displaying scrolling text or chunky abstract designs, Heartbreak Hotel offers a series of vignettes. We first meet McCracken’s unnamed character six months after a relationship has ended, then drop into her life of enduring heartache across several years.

There are also flashbacks to the breakup, which are enriched by breadcrumbs dropped with restraint through the text. Simon Leary interprets numerous male characters, including the ex who remains the protagonist’s best friend.

There’s plenty going on between these scenes. The fourth wall is regularly broken as McCracken checks in with the audience or explains that she’s a novice singer and synth player.

With auto-tuned vocals and the six chords in her arsenal, sustained and darkly ethereal, she gives us stripped-back grabs from several retro break-up songs by the likes of Bonnie Raitt, The Cranberries and, as the play’s title suggests, Elvis.

Simon Leary and Karin McCracken in Heartbreak Hotel. Photo © Andi Crown Photography

McCracken also delivers enlightening monologues about the physiology of heartbreak – including that people can actually die of a broken heart, when stress causes the organ to go out of shape. She speaks of hormones, from feel-good to fear, and how that rare emotion, awe, helps put self-absorbed lives back into perspective.

She’s a likeable guide with nerdy charm and wry humour, while in dramatic mode there’s an unexpected clinical quality to a character experiencing such grief she mistakes the symptoms for a heart attack.

Leary brings almost no differentiation to his numerous supporting roles, from gay pal to awkward-conversation date. In the same jeans and white Tshirt, and much the same accent and tone of voice, he repeatedly pops up as a pleasant everyman. Although the dialogue quickly makes it clear who each character is, it’s a curious dramatic choice.

Filament Eleven 11’s production and lighting design enhances Heartbreak Hotel’s sometimes moody, sometimes scientific quality. Other than shagpile carpet and a table (mostly there for the mini synth), the set comprises banks of narrow LED panels that display chapter headings for both the vignettes and physiology tutorials.

They also display slowly swirling abstract designs that add little, but the meditative finale’s flickering little blocks of green are an entrancing depiction of what I took to be fireflies.

Heartbreak Hotel is a quirky, intelligent, adroitly structured and paced exploration of something humans usually experience in some form, whether someone we love leaves, dies or doesn’t reciprocate. It’s universal, but the grief McCracken invites the audience into is so extreme I found this play difficult to relate to.

Heartbreak Hotel is at the Fairfax Studio, Melbourne, until 19 July, then Her Majesty’s Theatre, Ballarat, on 8 August, Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, Wollongong, 12-15 August, and HOTA, Gold Coast, 19-22 August.