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Grand Theft Hamlet is a masterpiece. On one hand, the in-game feature documentary that culminates in an unexpectedly moving rendition of one of literature’s most acclaimed tragedies perfectly captures the boundless possibilities of video games. Simply by giving inventive players the tools to create and perform, we’re shown how even William Shakespeare can be led to the heart of Los Santos.
On the other hand, shot entirely inside GTA Online, Grand Theft Hamlet is a refreshing and nuanced exploration of telling old stories in new and unlikely ways.
As a long-serving (and long-suffering) GTA roleplay enthusiast, the project—led by Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen and Pinny Grylls—also provides a hilarious, candid glimpse behind the velvet rope at the hardships of staging, well, anything in the throes of a virtual warzone. The public lobbies in GTA 5’s online offshoot are brimming with trigger-happy griefers who can make the short 60-second stroll around the perimeter of Legion Square without having your guts painted on the sidewalk impossible. Auditioning, rehearsing and acting out a 400-year-old play in a decade-old open world should be out of the question.
Granted the limitations of GTA Online’s sandbox often twist the classic beyond recognition—Shakespeare’s most ubiquitous soliloquy plays out against the faint whir of police sirens and rifle blasts somewhere off in the distance, for example, while a nightclub-promoting blimp inadvertently crashes from the sky at one point prompting a forced intermission—but it all just works every step of the way.
From a personal standpoint, I’ve lost count of the hours poured into each batshit roleplay scenario I’ve conjured over the last several years, therefore I simply cannot fathom the amount of time, effort and failure that must have gone into a project so ambitious in scale as this one. And that’s before editing the “making of”-style documentary that’s since featured at the London Film Festival among other prestigious events around the globe.
That alone is well worth celebrating.
The Comedy of Errors
There is, of course, a tragic irony about the fact Grand Theft Hamlet was first conceived during the harshest restrictions of early-2021 COVID-19 lockdowns. Isolated and out-of-work, London-based actors Crane and Oosterveen used GTA Online’s dysfunctional playground more as a distraction from the uncertainty of the world in that moment, than the hotbed for creative endeavour it’d become.
Fast forward several months with Grylls enlisted as co-director, and the likes of Bernardo, Marcellus, Claudius and the play’s titular Prince of Denmark himself were portrayed by typically outlandish in-game avatars sporting fishnet stockings, bright crimson underwear, Lincoln-esque tophats, and a full-body lime green alien suit with protruding ass plates that appeared to wiggle ever-so-slightly with every movement.
In the same way Baz Luhrmann steered Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet off the beaten track with his mid-90s crime drama adaptation, Grand Theft Hamlet skirts between the sublime and the ridiculous with great effect, while iconic lines are hamstrung by lag or the grainy audio quality levied by headset microphones, lending the whole thing a Monty Python-like charm.
If someone had rendered Viola and Sebastian in San Andreas or Vice City between 2002 and 2004, I’d have been all over it
Beyond its technical marvel and scope to snapshot a moment in time, then, Grand Theft Hamlet’s greatest achievement is perhaps its ability to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn’t hear this story. Hamlet is a bonafide classic in literary terms, but if you’re less into works inspired by Greek tragedy and Elizabethan drama and more into blowing shit up while tearing down a make-believe highway in a stolen car, do you really care?
As a Glasgow teenager at high school in the early 2000s, I remember being forced to read Twelfth Night and wondering the whole time why “this boring old English bastard” had anything to do with modern learning. As an adult, my opinions of Shakespeare have matured, but if someone had rendered Viola and Sebastian in San Andreas or Vice City between 2002 and 2004, I’d have been all over it.
Which could well be the case in the here and now with Grand Theft Hamlet. Performance culture has long existed in GTA Online, not least through its once thriving stunt scene, its machinima community, and, indeed, its roleplay servers, but whenever something cracks the mainstream—when in-game documentaries are being treated with the same reverence as anything on streaming services or the latest hard-news expose of the day—then it’s worth paying attention.
After every episode of HBO’s The Last of Us aired in 2023, I received a text message from my mother gushing about how sophisticated its narrative and characters were, and how while she’s “not normally into zombie stories,” this one was so well told. Anyone familiar with the PlayStation game, of course, had experienced the same tale up to 10 years earlier. My mother is never going to play The Last of Us, but she still managed to enjoy Ellie and Joel’s post-apocalyptic exploits by different means—and that’s exactly how I see Grand Theft Hamlet.
It’s also a two-way street: people into GTA might discover something they otherwise wouldn’t have, while the Shakespeare-loving bardolators among us, again, are shown the boundless possibilities of video games with the right creative minds in front of their screens.
And so through all of this, when Grand Theft Hamlet asks: to be or not to be? To be honest, it’s not even a question.
Grand Theft Hamlet releases in US theaters today. For more info, here’s the official website.
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Kurt Indovina
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