Grand Theft Hamlet review - intriguing documentary about Shakespeare as multi-player shooter game

On July 4, 2022, one of the most unusual performances in Hamlet’s lengthy and much travelled CV took place: an in-game stream for players of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

This piece of "videogame theatre" was the brainchild of two out of work British actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen; Pinny Grylls, Sam’s wife, shot and edited it, using the camera functions on her phone. Their account of this process in the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet has been a hit at film festivals and even won an award from The Stage.

The project was born of frustration and boredom during the third lockdown, while the two actors were stranded at home by Covid-19. Sam stumbled upon the idea while shooting all-comers in GTA, whose “mindless violence” was ideally suited to his “mindless life” at the time, he says. Its dystopian scenarios –  urban wastelands full of no-hopers, dopers and weirdos, NPCs (non-playable characters) and chancers stealing turbocharged cars – weren’t that far removed from the violent world of the Prince of Denmark, surely? As a game can be recorded, including the dialogue exchanged with other players, why not give them actual roles and authentic dialogue from the play to speak?

Early on in Grand Theft Hamlet, Mark comments that the Venn diagram for “interested in Shakespeare” and “GTA player” would show a very small overlap. He was wrong. When an invitation to audition is posted, a trickle of people log on. But the first people “invited” into the auditions have a nasty trigger-happy tendency to “waste” their hosts before the concept can be explained to them. Slowly the two men find like-minded souls – similarly jobless theatre practitioners or people with ambitions to act – and start casting. 

Their first choice for Hamlet, known as Dipo, has to drop out when he gets an actual job IRL, but he is still sufficiently intrigued to take a smaller role. A Tunisian-Finn whose handle is Parteb and whose avatar (pictured above, right) looks like a cross between the Creature from the Black Lagoon and Kermit the Frog, auditions by reciting the Qu'ran and volunteers to patrol the game like an unearthly security guard. (In GTA this can mean taking to the skies in a fighter jet and blasting the enemy from on high.) One player, the top-hatted owner of an in-game club who goes on to host the after-party, just loves to watch without saying a word. Inevitably, even in this manufactured world there are selfie-zombies cluttering up the playing area by just standing around with their phones at the ready, some of the many NCPs (non-character players) who turn up spontaeously in each scene.

Eventually it becomes clear that the only person who can take on the strenuous title role is Sam. As we watch, he increasingly channels into his soliloquies all the world-weariness of a typical locked-down citizen who has lost his mirth. His pain is heartfelt. And the edgy feel of the game perfectly matches the simmering violence in the rotten state of Denmark, where family and friends turn traitor and foreign armies march through. Here, SWAT teams and police helicopters arrive to deliver violent justice, and the desert places and dystopian ‘hoods of “Los Santos” become fertile territory for speeches about a world Hamlet sees as a “sterile promontory”, “stale and profitless”.

As preparations progress, the production becomes more inventive. Much of it is set in “Vinewood”, which has its own white hillside sign and “bowl” outdoor theatre; the Danish court is a large office building with a hording that can be made to say “Elsinore”. For Gareth, who plays the Ghost, Los Santos – ie Los Angeles — is an ideal setting because it’s “lots of people pretending to be something they’re not”. (Which can be said about the whole notion of representing yourself with an avatar, too.) A blimp (pictured above) stands in for the battlements where Horatio and the guards encounter Hamlet Senior’s ghost. The project also attracts a de facto stage manager, a masked mystery man who turns up unasked to fix Sam and Mark's problems. When they discover 21 people are already waiting for the July 4 performance long before curtain up, Sam quips that he’s played spaces with smaller crowds than that.

The humour grows darker. Pinny is astounded that there are people already logged in and playing GTA first thing, when they start rehearsing. “Who on earth would be playing at 7am?” she muses. Sam has to point out to her that they are. Relationships begin to creak. When Sam becomes so engrossed in the project that he misses Pinny’s birthday, she’s really angry and says she’s glad a police car speeded up and “wasted” him when he got embroiled in a bar brawl. Mark is annoyed when Sam suggests axeing the project when lockdown starts to ease as it's all he has, a man with no living relatives left. 

This is an intriguing watch,  and often a strikingly beautiful one: the artwork of the backdrops is a triumph, all moody sunsets and eerie empty streets, then veering off into the lush modern interiors of nightclubs and luxury penthouses. It's also laugh-out-loud funny. Platitudes like Sam's when he tells his cast  he wants rehearsals to be a "safe environment" become hiilarious ironies given that a stranger-player could burst in and blow them up at any time. Everyone being recorded at the rehearsal of "The Mousetrap" corpses when a character in it arrives to seek his revenge with a rocket launcher.

Nothing is off-limits here: wasted players reset and start agaim, broken planes too. As one of the cast suggests, the possibilities for using the medium are limitless: “Shakespeare on a billion-dollar budget”. Imagine what it would be like funded by Elon Musk, he offers. There is profuse swearing, none of it authentically Elizabethan, and a collage of sounds – music, the chatter of the many NCPs rubbernecking – that sometimes threatens to distract from the dialogue. 

But Shakespeare’s verse proves it can take on all-comers. It intrigues Nora, a trans man who finds a soulmate in Hamlet and his attempts at self-understanding, while Sam has a decidedly princely wobble about being able to do the role at all, then goes on, in between wastings, to give a performance of impressive depth and nuance. Next stop Titus Andronicus?

• Grand Theft Hamlet is in cinemas 6 December, then streaming on MUBI in early 2025
• More film reviews on theartsdesk