‘Grand Theft Hamlet’ Review: The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

Art thrives under fire in this documentary about a Hamlet production unlike any other.

Grand Theft Hamlet
Photo: MUBI

If one thing is certain about uncertain times, it’s that people will still try to create art. And it was in the midst of the boredom and artistic desperation induced by Covid-19 lockdown that Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls, and Mark Oosterveen came up with the idea to stage a production of Hamlet inside the virtual cityscape of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto Online.

GTA Online is something of a perfect conduit for what Crane and company attempt to create. After all, the subtext of Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player campaign is the idea of men trying to divine meaning from what they do and what still needs doing. That campaign also represents another level down of Rockstar’s meta-creative reckoning with the monsters they’ve unleashed. That side of GTA 5 has since been utterly eclipsed by its lawless online counterpart, which made an already popular game into what’s considered the most profitable media title of all time. The question, ultimately, comes down to what humanity exists in an inhumane environment?

The answer, it turns out, is a lot. Grand Theft Hamlet starts with a smirking flight of fancy: Actors whose careers are sidelined by the pandemic, Crane and Oosterveen are messing around in GTA Online when they find themselves at the Vinewood Bowl, Los Santos’s Hollywood Bowl equivalent, where they hilariously start reciting Shakespeare on the stage while trying to shake their star rating. Slowly, an idea takes form. Using emotes and various in-game weaponry to ply their trade on the empty stage and around the expansive city—pleading with rando passers-by not to shoot them during their monologues—the idea expands, with Crane, his documentarian partner Grylls, and Oosterveen putting out an in-game call for auditions to do a full show.

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A few professional actors answer the call, including Jen Cohn, who voices Pharah in Overwatch and gives an audition for the ages here as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. A few enthusiastic amateurs follow. But finding serious actors who know their craft isn’t so much the impressive and poignant core of the film as the other humans who defy classification. One player, a “half-Tunisian, half-Finnish” person dressed in an alien outfit, shows up to the Bowl muttering about drugs. When Crane and Oosterveen jokingly invite him to audition, he winds up giving a solemn, beautiful reading from the Qu’ran. And one woman who auditions later mentions—and perhaps pointedly in a public bathroom in-game—having recently come out as trans, and connecting to the idea of performers trying to tap into vulnerability in a deeply hostile place.

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Grand Theft Hamlet excels at blurring the line between low and high art. Shakespeare knew that he was writing for those in the cheap seats just as much as he was for the wealthy patrons of the Globe Theatre, and there’s something perfect about hearing the Bard’s dialogue recited without irony using a video game’s assets in a virtual analog for Los Angeles. The flipside is the part that’s less expected. While the unscripted moments of chaos keep the story rolling at a steady pace, the film is a rather striking, beautiful testament to what Rockstar built as well.

It’s easier than one might expect to find places in the famously nihilistic and satirical world of Grand Theft Auto V where the chaos dances alongside beautifully crafted interactive art. A game famous for letting players curbstomp NPCs into the dirt dedicated just as many resources to the beautiful glow of a sun-kissed beach, star-lit desert nights, and sunken faces that’d be right at home in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. The folks at Rockstar, clearly, are already well aware of what this medium is capable of even if they, too, still have to cater to the cheap seats. Grand Theft Hamlet, at its quietest, gives better proof of that than any E3 trailer.

More than that, it’s thrilling when Crane, Grylls, and Oosterveen start realizing that the virtual world of GTA Online offers seemingly infinite possibilities. Yes, they’d be under constant threat, as rehearsals can be interrupted at any moment by anything from a rocket launcher attack to a police shootout to a random shit-stirrer with a shotgun. But they’re also able to stage soliloquies on the top of a blimp high enough to allow them to see the Earth’s curve, or bring the audience to a yacht doubling as an opulent empire that’s lost its patriarch.

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After a while, even with all the violence and unfocused hate and logistical nightmares of the world against the cast and crew, the whole endeavor becomes just another theater production with all of its highs and lows. The film’s biggest singular flaw is that we only see a small piece of the final product. But we see enough of it for Grand Theft Hamlet to magnificently make its ultimate point. In the words of its lead actor, and his shirtless, goateed, princely avatar, as he catches a hail of bullets yet again: “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers.”

Score: 
 Cast: Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen, Pinny Grylls, Jen Cohn, Dipo Ola, Gareth Turkington  Director: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls  Screenwriter: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls  Distributor: MUBI  Running Time: 89 min  Rating: R  Year: 2024

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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