Grand Theft Hamlet: Why these unemployed actors staged a Shakespeare play inside a video game

There would be no point claiming that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1993 flop The Last Action Hero is secretly a cinematic masterpiece. But it does have one great joke: an action movie-obsessed kid falls asleep in a Shakespeare class and dreams about Hamlet if it starred Jack Slater, his favourite meathead actor. Cut to a minute-long trailer where Arnie plays the indecisive Dane as a hard charging, cigar-smoking juggernaut, machine-gunning an aghast Polonius and throwing Claudius out of a stained-glass window. “To be or not to be?” wonders this not-so-fair prince. “Not to be.” Cue massive explosion.

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That mash-up of casual Hollywood violence and Shakespeare’s deathless verse came rushing back to me when watching Grand Theft Hamlet, a homegrown documentary about killer drama in a video game. Grand Theft Auto Online is a vast multiplayer gaming space that launched alongside the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto V game in 2013.

Players materialise in Los Santos, an exaggerated but vaguely accurate version of Los Angeles, where they can go anywhere and do anything. That usually means stealing sports cars and shooting other people with rocket launchers.

Inside this gorgeously realised but often chaotic virtual landscape is where we meet friends Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, or at least their in-game avatars. They are unemployed actors but not through choice: it is January 2021 and the UK’s third lockdown has torpedoed their employment prospects. Hanging out in GTA Online is a way to keep in touch while isolating. It helps that Sam and Mark – who self-describe as “two white 40-something blokes” – are competent enough at gaming that they can waffle away over the crackly Skype-style voice chat as they screech around in golf buggies.

It is during one of these knockabout sessions that Sam and Mark stumble across the game’s equivalent of the Hollywood Bowl – a grandiose stage with a vast outdoor amphitheatre. Their actor instincts kick in: could you put on a theatre show within the game? Mark takes the stage and does a bit of the Scottish play. Soon they are hatching plans to put on a version of Hamlet that takes advantage of everything that sprawling Los Santos has to offer.

So this is a “let’s put the show on right here!” story, with all the wacky auditions, picturesque location scouting and unexpected behind-the-scenes disasters that you might expect in a real-world theatre production. In GTA Online, there is the added wrinkle that in public play sessions some inquisitive random can gatecrash your rehearsals, toss a few grenades around and trigger the game’s overzealous cops.

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Co-directed by Crane and his partner Pinny Grylls (who joins sessions with her own avatar, framing shots for the documentary through the game’s camera phone function), Grand Theft Hamlet smartly never breaks the immersive spell by cutting away to the real world, where presumably Sam and Mark are hunched bleary-eyed in front of their PlayStations.

This forces viewers perhaps unfamiliar with the exuberance of online gaming – a place where the costumes are outlandish and the self-expression is anarchic – to acclimatise quickly to the heightened milieu.

If the film was just about how to ‘act’ effectively using the pre-set emotes available in GTA Online – cute little avatar animations of pointing, thumbs-up, dancing etc – or the logistical problems of transporting your cast and audience to the next location in the game world, it would be fascinating. But there are also emotional flashpoints. The time demands of the project put enough pressure on Sam and Pinny’s real-life relationship to spark in-game conflict while Mark wrestles with the fact that he lacks a traditional family unit to lean on during lockdowns.

Between the interpersonal stresses and the fraught efforts of delivering the full performance on opening night (necessarily presented as edited highlights to keep the running time down) it can feel like Grand Theft Hamlet is throwing a lot at the digital wall to see what might stick.

For all its exuberant highs, it is also unlikely to inspire a craze for amateur promenade Shakespeare in the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI when that game launches next year. But as a tale of what can be achieved when best friends and helpful strangers work together in difficult circumstances to make art, it is an inspiring and really rather moving piece of work.

Grand Theft Hamlet is in cinemas from 6 December.

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