Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary that follows two out-of-work actors, struggling during UK covid lockdowns, trying to stage a production of Hamlet in Rockstar’s online game. It tells a hilarious and earnestly moving story about trying to make art against the odds, where those odds are both real-world challenges and trying to keep the in-game actors alive long enough to finish the play.
Grand Theft Hamlet stars Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen who, while playing around in GTA Online in 2021, stumble across the game’s Vinewood Bowl and playfully perform a Shakespeare monologue on its stage. They wonder if they could do an actual play in the arena, and the idea becomes an ambitious plan to hold auditions, have rehearsals, and mount a full production of Hamlet that takes place across Los Santos. They make a recruiting video and enlist Crane’s partner Pinny Grylls to film their efforts using in-game tools.
There’s a lot of real emotion underneath this setup. The lockdowns are hard on all of them, especially Oosterveen, who struggles with loneliness and familial tragedy and sees value in GTA Online for being “whatever takes you away from the crushing inevitability of your pointless life.” At one point, he relatably rails against transit ads that encourage artists to learn to code. In a Q&A after my screening at New York’s IFC Center, Grylls, new to the game, noted how much NPCs cowering and fleeing reminded her of social distancing during the early days of covid; she likened the in-game feed that records player deaths to the updates of covid deaths happening in the real world at the time.
In light of the tragedy happening around them, Hamlet feels like the right play for the moment (in the Q&A, Oosterveen noted that its “To be or not to be” speech is “about men being depressed and not knowing what to do”). And GTA Online is an unexpectedly fitting place to stage it: The grandeur of its nightclubs and mansions reflect the ostentation of Elsinore, and GTA Online’s violent premise and gruff emotes fit right in with a play where basically everyone dies. But all this appropriate violence is also in conflict with the group’s efforts to get anything done, as auditions, rehearsals, and even the most innocuous meetings devolve into chaos.
Luckily, it simply never gets old to watch the actors get interrupted by a car chase, a gunfight, a plummeting plane, or a team of virtual cops. (At the screening, they wore tshirts that read “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers.”) And what starts as a challenge soon becomes just another part of the production, the particular twist on Hamlet that every Shakespeare staging leans on to differentiate itself. In the Q&A, Grylls noted that “We’re putting on a play inside a game, but the game is a kind of play, because we’re playing.” That playfulness shines through in how the cast interacts with the bloody reality of GTA Online; everyone faces things with good humor and shows remarkable fortitude.
And the challenge seems to bind the cast together. The audition scenes are particularly charming: someone identifying themselves as a literary agent who’s always wanted to act gets on her nephew’s account to try out, her voice incongruous against her shirtless male avatar. GTA roleplayers, real-life friends, and even Overwatch voice actor Jen Cohn join the cast, each finding their own value in Hamlet, the game, and the support of their colleagues. A young trans woman early in transition relates to the play’s themes, seeing a connection between her real-life relationships and the way that Hamlet uncovers who his friends and family really are. The production also attracts hangers-on–a mysterious defacto stage manager, a player dressed as an alien who supports the project through to the end. “We just keep coming across these people who want to help us,” the filmmakers marvel.
But it’s not all fun, especially as real-life stresses intervene. Oosterveen becomes, as he said in the Q&A, “more emotionally attached to the project than I realized.” Grylls and Crane argue over how the project is impacting their real-world relationship, at one point having an early morning spat as their in-game avatars before reminding each other that they’re sitting in the same house. There’s a broader question of how “real” the production is, whether it’s a legitimate theatrical project or just a silly diversion from the pain of the real world. It’s a question that might resonate with anyone who spends a lot of time in video games.
In the Q&A, Oosterveen suggested that Shakespeare, now considered “high” art, wasn’t seen that way in the playwright’s time, and the way many people might look down on video games today isn’t dissimilar to how they saw the theater back then. Grand Theft Hamlet feels like a celebration of both an under-looked side of Shakespeare productions and performances and a celebration of how weird video games can be, something broader audiences might not be familiar with. It made me both want to rewatch my favorite Hamlet, and, maybe less wisely, check out GTA Online. Grand Theft Hamlet is playing now in select theaters and coming to streaming on Mubi.
