Grand Theft Hamlet
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
Directed by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls
UK & USA, 2024
Is this a joystick which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
This week’s film is a kind of documentary. Grand Theft Hamlet follows the creation of a Shakespeare production. We have been here before with Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard and arguably, Shakespeare in Love. This is different, as here we are watching an attempt to show Hamlet in the setting of a video game, Grand Theft Auto.
For the uninitiated (including one member of ReidsonFilm) Grand Theft Auto is set in a fictionalised American city – here, Los Santos, a stand-in for Los Angeles – where players roam an urban terrain of money, vice and violence. You play as a criminal navigating a violent underworld: driving fast cars, staging heists, and enjoying shootouts.
The film’s premise comes from two actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, stuck at home and unemployed during the Covid lockdown of 2021. Two friends, they spend many hours playing Grand Theft Auto and drifting through the city. When they come across the fictional equivalent of the Hollywood Bowl, they paraphrase the line that Mickey Rooney memorably, and repeatedly, said to Judy Garland, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!”
In the pixelated world of Grand Theft Auto, however, putting on a show – in this case Hamlet – comes with a unique set of challenges, Mark (or rather, his avatar) steps onstage to deliver one of Macbeth’s great soliloquies:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
…fitting words for life in lockdown. But before he finishes, a squadron of police helicopters descends – does everyone in the video game world travel by chopper? – and both Sam and Mark collapse in a hail of gunfire. The screen flares with the message: Wasted.
There is an irresistible dynamism, a vitality, about Grand Theft Hamlet. A diverse, and I mean really diverse, range of avatars turn up for the auditions – some, out of work actors, others random game players attracted to the concept. ParTeb, a lime-green alien is actually a Tunisian gamer who can’t act in the play but offers his services as the production’s bodyguard. Helpful, given the persistent anxiety in the GTA world that when someone approaches you, they may want to engage in conversation, or they simply want to shoot you – sometimes both. Nevertheless, ParTeb still has an audition, and in an affecting moment recites a passage from the Quran.
There are other risks too, a topless, top-hat-wearing avatar turns up for an audition. This is DJPhil, a Hamlet-loving mother and literary agent who beautifully declaims Hamlet’s lines before the play’s climactic duel. She looks to be heading for a lead role until her son returns, takes back his account and locks her out of it.
Living in a virtual world does come with obvious benefits though. The digital universe allows for production values that Hollywood studios can only dream of. The Kingdom of Elsinore is transformed into a luxury mega-yacht out on the ocean, but auditions and rehearsals are held in a penthouse pad for the uber-rich, a subway station that harks back to The Matrix, and up amongst the clouds, performing on an airship.
So, we have the set-up, the auditions, and the rehearsals. The performance of Hamlet itself took place online on the 4th of July, 2022 with a run time of over four hours. But at least you would have been spared the rigor mortis that routinely sets in with the cramped conditions of a West End theatre. What we see in the film is just a selection of Hamlet’s greatest or ‘palpable’ hits. The vast empty spaces and uncanny-valley avatars in Grand Theft Hamlet add to the melancholic atmosphere of this rotten state of Denmark, and there must be something thrilling for an actor, speaking in iambic pentameters while whipping out a shotgun or crash-landing a helicopter.
Of course, a few technical glitches are to be expected, the most notable being when the airship crashes, wiping out all of the dramatis personae. That is one of the downsides of this virtual production: death and rebirth comes so easily that nothing really feels at stake. There is no tragedy at the heart of this Hamlet. And some of the off-stage meta-commentary, the real-world conversations, feel forced – scripted to deliver a poignant ending.
Even so, like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet this was Shakespeare given a radical refresh: exciting, enjoyable, and I’m certain that Grand Theft Hamlet would have had the 17th-century penny stinkards rolling and roaring about the pit:
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause.
As someone very familiar with GTA, 40% of the film was not that interesting to me, but I appreciate for non-game players, it’s a novelty: people getting shot and the police turning up etc. Part of me thinks it would have been nice to just have the final version of the production and watched that as the actual production was more interesting - that and the dimension where you got insights into random people’s lives in lockdown - C
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 58
T - 72
N - 65
S - 73
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Coming next… Inherent Vice(2014)