Grand Theft Hamlet
(UK, 90 min.)
Dir. Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane
When it comes to the performing arts, few experiences satisfy as much as an audacious Shakespeare production on stage or screen. Watching one as a video game proves a novelty, if a fleeting one. Grand Theft Hamlet comes to streaming after causing a sensation on the festival circuit, but puzzles a will on arrival.
Directors Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane offer with Grand Theft Hamlet a unique time capsule of how the arts adapted during the lockdown days of the pandemic. Crane tells how he scored a role in a stage production of Harry Potter just before COVID-19 closed the world. He spends his days playing the video game Grand Theft Auto and connects to a virtual community.
While putting virtual bullets in fellow car-jackers and stealing hot rides, he and his actor friend Mark Oosterveen stumble upon an outdoor stage in the game world. They riff Shakespeare lines and have a brain wave: wouldn’t it be cool to stage the Bard in virtual reality. All the world’s a stage, after all.
Crane and Oosterveen create an original alternative to live theatre with their idea to produce Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto. They put out feelers to fellow gamers and canvas a cast. The project connects them with gamers escaping isolation. Some are fellow actors, but most are amateurs. The film observes as they try to rehearse lines and block scenes. There’s just one problem: Grand Theft Auto’s violent nature means that players keep getting shot. Even though (spoiler alert) everybody dies in Hamlet, they usually make it through key scenes.
The unpredictability of the gaming world means that Crane and Oosterveen can’t escape some inadvertent improvisation. Grand Theft Hamlet provides droll laughs when cars and/or bullets mow down actors soliloquies, or police start descend from the sky or cars fly by with bullets whizzing behind them. It’s perhaps the most chaotic production of Hamlet committed to stage or screen.
Grylls, Crane’s partner IRL, joins the party too. She’s a documentary filmmaker and wants to capture both the show and its inception. The game lets her spend time with Crane, who increasingly retreats from his family into the game world. She smartly uses in-game cameras to record everything and grasps that the making of the play offers better material than the eventual production.
However, Grand Theft Hamlet assumes prior knowledge of Hamlet and Grand Theft Auto alike. The nature of the production means that the players walk through Shakespeare while working out the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. Audiences rusty on their high school English needn’t worry. But the film offers few explainers about the rules or world of Grand Theft Auto. Anyone who isn’t a gamer may be hopelessly lost. As someone coming to the film with a heavy interest in docs and Shakespeare, but zero experience in GTA and having outgrown gaming by a decade, I found it a struggle.
One doesn’t have to be a fan of either Hamlet or gaming, though, to appreciate the sense of community. This merry band of players proves cathartic and therapeutic across the virtual landscape. At the same time, though, Grand Theft Hamlet’s observation isn’t new. It just comes cloaked in a novel premise.
Films like The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, We Met in Virtual Reality, and even this year’s truly extraordinary Sundance short The Reality of Hope illustrate how the virtual world offers a chance for connection for people experiencing isolation. These relationships are real even if they’re enacted through headsets and consoles. Moreover, while those films may lack Grand Theft Hamlet’s novel hook, they expertly straddle both worlds: the virtual and the real. Grand Theft Hamlet essentially offers a longitudinal screen capture. Parsed from 300 hours of material, it boasts a contemporary twist on backstage documentary, albeit as a one-note joke.
It also lacks a critical eye for the many negative aspects of gaming culture, like online misogyny. Grylls bursts the idyllic bubble at one point to observe that Crane missed her birthday. As it becomes more apparent that staging Hamlet online substitutes for lived reality, the film often reverts to self-congratulatory backslaps about togetherness and sticking it out.
The nature of the game, however, does actually leave the performance of Hamlet lacking. Few of the enthusiastic participants deliver with dramatic gusto. More significantly, their microphones are generally better suited for casual communication than for professional production. Shakespeare’s verse frequently proves inaudible. For all the build up to Hamlet, the play itself suggests that these alternatives were great quick fixes during COVID, but no substitute for the real deal. It’s not nearly as rewarding to watch as it probably was to play.
