Grand Theft Hamlet uses GTA to put the chaos back into Shakespeare

Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary film, kind of. It’s also an experimental theater project. It’s also a rough-and-ready feature-length machinima, made entirely in-game in Grand Theft Auto Online. It’s also a slapstick comedy of errors about three friends trying to fill an empty period in their lives by staging a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside this chaotic online space. It’s a strange, funny, and even poignant film that takes place in a dreamlike space between gaming and theater.

In January 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were out of work and depressed. The U.K.’s third COVID-19 lockdown had begun, and London theaters were shut again. Crane had been due to start a run as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on the West End, which would have supported his family for a year, but that chance was shot now. Oosterveen was single, rootless, and had just started trying to get back to work after losing his father to a long battle with Alzheimer’s.

“We were buggered,” Crane’s wife, filmmaker Pinny Grylls, who co-directed Grand Theft Hamlet with Crane, told Polygon.

There was nothing to be done about the situation except play video games. Oosterveen, the gamer of the trio, showed his friend around Grand Theft Auto Online on PlayStation. Crane and Grylls hadn’t played games since they were kids, but had bought a PlayStation for their son the year before, somewhat reluctantly. “We argued about it,” Grylls said.

Crane initially had misgivings about GTA. “You just think, Oh yeah, that’s that one that is super violent, and there’s no redeeming characteristics to it at all,” he said. “And then when I started playing it, I was shocked at how beautiful it was, and how fun it was, and how freeing it was to play, and how broad it was.”

Crane wasn’t going in completely blind, though, and he wasn’t purely killing time, either. He was aware of the role-play and machinima communities in gaming, and interested in exploring them as a performance space. “I didn’t quite know what we were going to do in there — thought maybe we might just try and do some weird little YouTube skits or something like that,” he said.

Responding to this vague impulse, Crane and Oosterveen started capturing footage of their gameplay before they really knew what they were doing. That’s why, at the start of Grand Theft Hamlet, we can watch in real time as the pair stumble upon the Vinewood Bowl open-air theater in the hills of Los Santos, and hit upon the idea of performing Shakespeare there. Soon, they invited Grylls to join them in-game to document their efforts.

At first, it seems like a joke, suggesting that any actor encountering a new space immediately envisions themselves standing there in front of people, reciting “To be or not to be.” And there’s an obvious culture clash between Shakespearean tragedy and the crude violence and low-culture irreverence of GTA. The movie gets great comic mileage from rehearsals being interrupted by drive-by shootings and rocket-launcher accidents. But the trio also felt they were taking an unconventional route back to Shakespeare’s roots.

Grylls said Crane laid it out: “[Sam] said to me, it was probably similar to what it would’ve felt like to do Shakespeare 500 years ago in an irreverent space, where you were at the Globe and people were half-listening, and they were probably going to throw apples at the actors if they didn’t think they were any good, and someone went off with a prostitute, and then somebody had a fight. You had to maintain the attention of the audience. It was really quite hard. [For us] the liveness of that kind of challenge was fresh and exciting and funny.”

“A lot of theater, and especially Shakespeare, has this hushed reverence around it,” Crane said. “And it was really refreshing to find a space where none of that existed, and it was just rough and raw and kind of funny and violent.”

Crane and Oosterveen assembled a small company of misfits to act in their Hamlet. But like many small theater troupes, they also attracted some oddball hangers-on that contributed to the chaotic energy of the production as it evolved from a stage show at the Vinewood Bowl to an immersive theater experience that would roam across the Los Santos map (on the back of a zeppelin, at one point).

One of these hangers-on makes a particularly big impression in the movie. GTA player ParTebMosMir wears a green alien skin, recites the Quran at his audition, and runs security for rehearsals in a VTOL jet, gunning down disruptive elements from the skies. “I should say, everyone seems to like ParTeb, and he comes across very well in the film, but I really want to make it clear that that guy was a nightmare to work with,” Oosterveen said, displaying a bit of actorly impatience. “To get him to do anything, anything, took hours and hours and hours.”

“There’s this apocryphal story about [famed German playwright and director] Bertolt Brecht, who in one of his productions thought it was all going a bit too smoothly,” Crane added. “So he found this local drunk guy and just brought him onstage, and he had to just deal with it. So I think maybe ParTeb has something of that quality, the kind of rogue element, the bit of chaos that you put in just to shake things up a bit.”

Throughout the movie, ParTeb and others like him are surreally funny reminders of the weird context the actors put themselves in. Another reminder comes from the presentation of the footage, which is intentionally raw and unvarnished, with the game’s UI elements still visible. Explaining this decision, Grylls said simply, “It’s a documentary, it’s not a fiction film.” But GTA Online’s on-screen alerts also provide an ironic meta-commentary during the performance of Hamlet (“Hamlet_thedane killed King_Claudius”) and a strangely poignant sense of what was going on beyond the actors’ experiment.

“Someone who got in touch with us said they were so moved by watching the film, and the constant thing coming up in the corner — ‘So-and-so has died’ — this almost ticker-tape thing of death,” Crane said. “And how that was so redolent of the pandemic and seeing those news stories of the number of people who were infected and had died.”

In person — or on a video call, anyway — the trio seem like typical London theater-and-the-arts types. Crane looks like, well, a middle-aged Harry Potter. Grylls has short peroxide hair and a Day-Glo Def Leppard sweater. Oosterveen is wearing a Hawaiian shirt on a cold January evening. Their actorliness makes it tempting to suspect that some of the movie’s most dramatic moments, like an in-game row between Crane and Grylls, were staged. But while they admit they rerecorded a few lines of dialogue to clean up the audio, they deny setting up any events in the game just for their movie.

“The argument actually did happen,” Grylls said. “It happened in real life the day before because it was my birthday, and he’d missed my birthday, and I said to him, when we went to bed, ‘You are an arsehole,’ basically. And then in the morning I woke up and he was on the fucking game. So actually, that was real. I jumped into the game and I said, ‘Where are you? It’s 7:30 in the morning, you’re already in this game, the only way I’m going to talk to you is to go in the game.’” She said she was worried about Oosterveen’s obsessive game-playing, too, but he shrugs it off. “I literally had no responsibilities,” he said. “I was full goblin mode.”

For all that Grand Theft Hamlet is a comedy of contrasts, the trio ended up with a feeling that video games and theater have a lot in common.

“I think that they are so similar,” Grylls said. “Think about it: They are live spaces where things unfold and anything could happen. And it’s about pretending to be something you’re not.”

Gaming “can often be a test of empathy,” Oosterveen said. “If you’re playing a game and the lead character is nothing like you, it can be very interesting, because then you are seeing things from their perspective. […] I think a lot of people are actors without realizing it, because they’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3, or they’re playing Mass Effect, and they’re basically making the same thought processes and choices that an actor makes.”

“That element of chaos in the game, I think, is so inherently theatrical,” Crane said. “For me, I want to try and hold on to this when I go back and do theater normally. To try and keep an element of that absolute chaos and carnage. Because that’s really fun and exciting.”

Grand Theft Hamlet is in theaters now.