‘Grand Theft Hamlet’: They Staged a Shakespeare Play Inside a Violent Video Game

At this point, we’ve just about exhausted the possibilities of the “quarantine movie” following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but every now and then something comes along that proves there’s at least one new angle worth exploring. How about a Shakespeare play cast, rehearsed, and performed entirely inside the virtual reality of an online video game? It’s the kind of harebrained idea born from extremes, and the result is Grand Theft Hamlet, which is exactly what it says on the tin.

During that roughly two-year span of “who knows what’s going to happen next” from 2020 to 2022, with the stress of quarantines and national lockdowns that separated us from our friends and loved ones came, ironically, an extreme sense of boredom. Extreme boredom, many of us found, fosters extreme creativity, or, at the very least, a desperate need to do something with your time to keep yourself from going nuts.

This is the position actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen found themselves in, out of work due to lockdown restrictions and forced to spend their time bopping around in Grand Theft Auto Online, “a violent and beautiful virtual world where almost anything is possible.” While fleeing from the in-game cops, Sam and Mark stumble upon the “Vinewood Bowl,” an outdoor arena built into the environment of the game’s Southern California-based setting. With the help of Sam’s partner and co-director Pinny Grylls, a documentary filmmaker, the three plan to stage the first ever production of a Shakespeare play inside a GTA game. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. Staging any sort of public event in a virtual world is tricky, and in this particular game, where players are encouraged to do harm to their fellow players, organizing anything is next to impossible. Like the toe-tapping teens of Footloose, the Hamlet crew is constantly being raided by police, and, in true Shakespeare tragedy fashion, the characters’ minimally expressive avatars keep getting wasted (killed) before getting much of anything done. But their determination shines through—“You can’t stop production just because somebody dies,” Pinny says—and they eventually manage to gather a cast of total strangers and hold rehearsals inside the game.

Aside from the sheer audacity of the project, Grand Theft Hamlet is also a testament to the passion of the developers and designers at GTA’s parent company Rockstar Games, who built a world where, yes, the whole point is to steal vehicles and shoot people, but also happens to be quite beautiful. There are desert sunsets and thunderstorms and meadows of lupine in GTA Online’s open world, and an “anything goes” game mechanic that allows for infinitely inventive ways to stage scenes.

Characters deliver soliloquies on top of blimps, in the middle of the ocean, or in a field of wind turbines just as often as they venture inside seedy nightclubs and underground parking lots. Occasionally the movie will tune in to the roaming NPCs, whose canned dialogue rivals the Bard himself. (I’d like to see Shakespeare come up with something as evocative as “They don’t want you to know about the missile launchers on the Vatican’s latest gyrocopter.”)

Grand Theft Hamlet oddly feels true to pandemic life in ways other COVID films haven’t. Maybe that’s to do with it being entirely filmed inside a video game—you’re not subjected to the now-clichéd images of people putting on face masks or dousing themselves in Purell. The cast is forced instead to work within the freedoms and restrictions of virtual spaces, in an environment that moves according to its own set of rules.

If nothing else, the movie is a celebration of the collaborative nature of human creativity, especially necessary in times of calamity, working together in a world that increasingly encourages antisocial behavior. A multifaceted project like this proves that people will find a way to make art even in an environment where they’d be better served launching rockets at each other’s flying cars.