I just ran my list of the best documentary films of last year, and while Grand Theft Hamlet arrives too late to merit consideration for 2024, it gets the 2025 documentary race off to a flying start. The story of two struggling actors who staged a full production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet while playing the online version of Grand Theft Auto was filmed entirely within the video game, and this movie which plays at Alamo Drafthouse Denton and AMC Grapevine Mills this week (as well as Mubi’s online streaming service) shows the startling uses to which people can put the medium.
We see the filmmakers conceive the idea for the movie in January 2021, when the U.K. is still under Covid lockdown. Unemployed British actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen are playing Grand Theft Auto Online when they run across a large outdoor amphitheater in the game called the Vinewood Bowl. The stage is large enough to make them think they could stage a play there, and Shakespeare’s tragedy comes to mind. Of course, their production runs into roadblocks that IRL theater companies don’t have to deal with. They’re running through the play’s opening scene when some spectators start shooting at them, despite Mark’s request not to murder the actors. The police eventually arrive on scene and kill everyone.
On a more prosaic note, the actor they cast to portray Hamlet, Dipo Ola, has to drop out of the project because he gets an acting job in real life. Crane and Oosterveen start up the project because they have nothing else to do, there being no acting jobs to be had. As 2021 moves into 2022 and the lockdowns are lifted, that excuse disappears and Sam’s wife Pinny Grylls (who creates a GTA character so she can film the experience) confronts him with the fact that this project has become his life to the point where she can’t speak to him unless she’s in the game, even though they live together. The film is rather weak on detail when it’s examining this side of the project.
It’s better when it’s chronicling how the game impacts the Shakespeare play. GTA allows for some funny touches, like during the play within the play, when the Player Lucianus uses a rocket launcher to blow up the Player King. However, it also allows for some touches that aren’t possible in a more traditional staging. The blimp that hovers over Los Santos becomes the setting for the scene when Hamlet meets his father’s ghost. The aerial backdrop is a breathtaking stand-in for the roof of Elsinore, and as the filmmakers point out, doing something similar in a movie would cost millions for special-effects. (And possibly even more if they did it live. Sam tries to demonstrate the safety of leaping from the roof of a building to the top of the blimp, and his avatar immediately rolls off the airship and falls to his death.) The treatment even manages to be moving during a montage of Grand Theft Auto’s seedier locations while Sam recites Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” speech.
It is amazing what a little creativity and a lot of boredom and downtime can accomplish. Maybe Grand Theft Hamlet isn’t one of the great Shakespeare productions I’ve seen, but ask anybody who goes to the theater regularly and they’ll tell you that Shakespeare has given them some of the worst and dullest wastes of any evening they’ve had. There’s no danger of that happening here. The ingenuity laced with pure madness that gave rise to this play is something that may well inspire your next creative jag, whether you’re a gamer or a theater nerd.
Grand Theft Hamlet
Starring Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls, and Mark Oosterveen. Written and directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls. Rated R.
