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Posted in: Awards/Nominations, Digital, Movies, Review | Tagged: comedy, documentary, grand theft auto online, Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Hamlet, MUBI, streaming, video games
Grand Theft Hamlet: A Surreal, Funny, Video Game Record of Lockdown
Grand Theft Hamlet is a surreal, funny poignant and meta meditation on putting on a play, video games and culture record of the Lockdown
Article Summary
- Unemployed London actors spark creativity by performing Hamlet amidst GTA Online's chaotic lockdown.
- A spontaneous digital stage emerges as virtual players and NPC cops collide in Shakespearean mayhem.
- The performance mirrors real-life struggles, loneliness, and art’s defiance in a global crisis.
- A surreal fusion of crisis and creativity redefines art and community in a hyper-virtual realm.
Grand Theft Hamlet is one of the strangest documentaries ever made. It's also a curious artifact, one of the last cultural remnants of the Pandemic. During the height of Lockdown in 2021, suddenly unemployed actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, going stir-crazy cooped up in their homes in London, started playing Grand Theft Auto Online and, while escaping from the police, discovered the Vineland Bowl, Los Santos' version of the Hollywood Bowl, a concert stadium in Los Angeles. On a whim, they decide to put on Shakespeare's Hamlet and use their virtual smartphones in the game to invite any players to come and watch them. When a random player shows up and starts trying to kill them, they fight back while reciting apt lines from Hamlet before the game's NPC cops show up in a helicopter and kill them all in a hilarious free-for-all entirely part of the game's "anything goes" feature. Sam's wife and filmmaker Pinny Grylls joins him and Mark to make a documentary about their decision to stage Hamlet in full, and the result is a surreal, farcical, hysterically funny, and poignant meditation on art and life during crisis.
Grand Theft Hamlet Gives New Meaning to "All the World's a Stage"
What begins as a silly, surreal, and farcical telling of a bunch of unemployed London actors' attempts to put on a production of Hamlet inside the Grand Theft Auto Online video game during COVID becomes a poignant and funny chronicle of life during Lockdown that's also a chronicle of friendship, loneliness, crisis, the artistic impulse that proves that Shakespeare at the right place (Grand Theft Auto Online) and the right time (The COVID Pandemic) in the right hands (bored, unemployed British actors) can become a life-changing and life-affirming experience for everyone involved as the in-game production becomes a place of solace for people struggling with loneliness and anxiety.
Staging Hamlet inside an open-world online video game is a completely bizarre folly that Sam and Mark know from the beginning. In fact, they acknowledge that it's a terrible idea and probably impossible to pull off, yet they decide to have a go of it because what else is there to do while locked down at home during a worldwide pandemic? They hold auditions and get surprising responses from fellow actors and people who have never acted before. They have to go through the sometimes annoying chaos of random players showing up to try to kill them, which becomes a surreal reflection of the violent times of Shakespeare and the violent world of the play itself. It turns out that the violent, amoral, hyper-capitalist world of Grand Theft Auto V reflected the chaos of the world and everyone's inner turmoil during the existential crises they were all suffering during the Pandemic when the whole world shut down. Grand Theft Hamlet becomes a digital Journal of the Plague Years that records the interior journey of everyone who participated in the production.
When Life Bleeds into Art into Video Game and Back Again and Again
TWatchingGrand Theft Hamlet also allows us to witness the process and personalities of actors at their rawest and most vulnerable as they try to support each other in a difficult mission. They lose their Hamlet when the actor friend they cast has to leave because he got a gig in the real world. Pinny becomes frustrated that Sam has become so obsessed with the production that he's neglecting her and their children when, in real life, they're in the same house, but he's spending all his time on the Playstation trying to put the play together. The play becomes everything Sam has in his life because he has no family left, is unemployed, and has nothing else. The role of Hamlet becomes in step with Sam's state of mind as he's "filmed" wandering the desolate landscapes of Grand Theft Auto Online, quietly reciting Hamlet's muses about life, death, loneliness, and the meaninglessness of life.
Nonetheless, staging Hamlet in the game brings them together with not just actors but people who find meaning in the play, including a young trans person who finds their truth in Hamlet's dilemma, a silent spectator who faithfully shows up to observe their progress,s and, hilariously, another player who volunteers to provide security for them as they rehearse, fending off any random players who show up to shoot at them or cause chaos with his own arsenal of weapons including a fighter jet, all while dressed as an alien. Their locations for staging the show are literally without limits inside the virtual world of Los Santos, a virtual version of Los Angeles, and they gradually navigate the best places to hold auditions, conversations, and settings for the play's various scenes.
Another Heaven, Another Hell, Another Purgatory, Another Stage
Grand Theft Hamlet ends up becoming the strangest and most human documentary in the artificial setting of a video game. It makes everyone start to think about "life" inside a virtual world where to die just means to respawn to try again in a completely chaotic world where anything can happen, which is why people play GTA Online in the first place. What does it mean when you don't have to worry about dying? It's like a combination of heaven, hell, and purgatory all at the same time since you can make anything you want, and for Sam and Mark, it's putting on a show.
While stuck in Lockdown, they were forced to think about what living means if you can make your art. An actor is nothing if they can't act or interact and engage with an audience, but they are still human, and the human thing to do is to find a way to make your art and act. To act in an imaginary story is to enter another world already. Doing that in the imaginary world of a video game adds another surreal layer to that hall of mirrors. Their production of Grand Theft Hamlet ends up showing how the play is relevant to life and the human condition, even in this most artificial setting that's bursting with humanity and joy. It's like J.G. Ballard's ultimate dream and nightmare of a violent, creative world filled with surreal and farcical madness that's humane, liberating, and joyful. All it takes is a dose of Shakespeare.
Grand Theft Hamlet is streaming exclusively on MUBI.
Grand Theft Hamlet
10/10
What begins as a silly, surreal and farcical telling of a bunch of unemployed London actors' attempts to put on a production of Hamlet inside the Grand Theft Auto Online video game during COVID becomes a poignant and funny chronicle of life during Lockdown that's also a chronicle of friendship, loneliness, crisis, the artistic impulse that proves that Shakespeare at the right place and the right time in the right hands can become a life-changing and life-affirming experience for everyone involved as the in-game production becomes a place of solace for people struggling with loneliness and anxiety.
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