The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns were strange times for all. Some turned to sourdough, and others turned to attempting a production of Shakespeare’s longest and most famous tragedy in an online multiplayer video game.
GRAND THEFT HAMLET is a documentary about Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen’s attempts to put their actor skills to good use when theatres were closed across the UK and find human connection in the process. How so? By staging Hamlet within the video game Grand Theft Auto Online. It is an audacious premise – will they find willing participants in an open-world game whose appeal lies at least partially in outrageous, unprovoked violence?
The idea sparks when one of the game’s high-speed missions leads Crane and Oosterveen to the Vinewood Bowl (the definitely-not-Hollywood Bowl in definitely-not-LA). On stage, with an empty auditorium stretching in front of them, they reflect on their paused professions and wonder how hard it would be to fill the stage and seats.
“The idea sparks when one of the game’s high-speed missions leads Crane and Oosterveen to […] an empty auditorium stretching in front of them, they reflect on their paused professions and wonder how hard it would be to fill the stage and seats.”
At their first attempt to perform the opening scene of guards keeping watch for the ghost of the dead king, two audience members do indeed show up – and promptly attempt to obliterate the other. Crane and Oosterveen recite the guards’ lines with guns drawn, alert to ghosts and in-game explosives alike. Crane’s partner Pinny Grylls (who co-directs the film alongside Crane) joins in the adventure despite never having played GTA herself, and the three form the core team on the hunt for willing in-game thespians.
The production soon moves beyond the Vinewood Bowl; a blimp, a yacht, rooftops, and beaches (the latter reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s fair Verona Beach in ROMEO + JULIET) are all home to rehearsals and the final quasi-site-specific production. Similarly, GRAND THEFT HAMLET moves beyond the mechanics of casting and rehearsing Shakespeare to the existential, much like Shakespeare’s tragic Danish prince. Crane and Oosterveen, at the time, did not know if the career they had trained for and dedicated their lives to would still exist on the other side of lockdown (these musings include a throwback to the Conservative government’s ill-judged cyber careers campaign). Likewise, is GTA Online a way to interact with the world, or escape it? While perhaps the presentation of some conflicts and problems feels contrived, their place in the project feels entirely believable.
“As it turns out, Hamlet and GTA are supremely well-matched, especially not amidst the emotional crises and sense of lost time engendered by the pandemic.”
As it turns out, Hamlet and GTA are supremely well-matched, especially not amidst the emotional crises and sense of lost time engendered by the pandemic. The juxtaposition of Shakespeare’s dialogue with gunfire, often before “WASTED” is projected across a fading screen, is funny in a way that heightens the dramatic and thematic stakes rather than undercutting them. When these committed actors beg a passing player to not kill them but instead listen to Hamlet’s great speeches, the ridiculous and sublime collide.
GRAND THEFT HAMLET is a relic of a strange time made with love, ingenuity, and originality, a testament to the enduring, almost addictive appeal of live theatre and human connection no matter what obstacles arise (an airborne virus, the in-game police). Shakespeare wrote King Lear during one of the London plague years; this is no less a cultural achievement. And where else will you see a play-within-a-play-within-a-game unfold with flamethrowers?