It would be interesting to hear what someone unacquainted with Grand Theft Auto, or any similar free-roaming video game, made of this curious artefact from the pandemic era. A large section of any potential audience might ask: “What exactly am I looking at here?”
In 2021, during one of the later British lockdowns, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two actors struggling for work, came up with an idea of staging a production of Hamlet within the online version of Grand Theft Auto V. The film, entirely composed of in-game footage (bar a brief coda), begins with the two men, in gangsta form, stumbling upon the Vinewood Bowl, the game’s version of the Hollywood Bowl, and hatching their mad plan. Online participants could speak the lines in suitable locations. The ghost might appear atop a blimp. Some scenes could take place in a subway station. The final violent meltdown could hardly be more appropriate for a game based on random slaying.
Grand Theft Hamlet does ask for a few leaps of faith. Are we genuinely hearing the plan developing in real time? Is this argument between romantic partners to be taken at face value? We’ve seen restaging in more conventional documentaries (if that’s what Grand Theft Hamlet is). The project is so charming it proves easy enough to give it some leeway.
The film is at its best when incorporating text from the play with oddly appropriate gameplay. The intoning of Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy over footage of a bar in the game’s skid row really does look like something from a straight-up indie film of the play. The “What a piece of work is a man” speech is positioned to identify GTA’s bloody world as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”. Meanwhile, as online participants drop in from all over the world, we get hints of how real lives – not least those of the film’s creators – were damaged by the Covid years.
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Yet what may end up sticking in most minds is the hilarious inconvenience of trying to perform Hamlet while every second passerby tries to mow you down with a magnum, submachine gun or anti-tank system. There truly are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
In cinemas from Friday, December 6th
