Updated January 21, 2025 at 16:01 PM ET
There aren't a lot of places where Shakespeare has never been performed, but the riotous (in every possible sense of the word) new film Grand Theft Hamlet finds one.
The action is to borrow a phrase from Macbeth, "full of sound and fury," largely because it takes place entirely inside the online video game Grand Theft Auto.
The idea for the project was hatched during the pandemic lockdown, when "to be or not to be an actor" was a serious question. Live theaters were closed. Gathering indoors with masks was a non-starter for a lot of people.
So in 2021, out-of-work actor pals Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were communicating mostly through their video game avatars in GTA, tooling around Los Santos, GTA's virtual version of Los Angeles. One day, they leaped off their stolen golf carts, the police on their tails, and ran up an embankment and discovered what looked a lot like the Hollywood Bowl — a huge amphitheater with a stage.
Being actors, they started soliloquizing and soon attracted onlookers, who, as GTA gamers tend to, almost immediately pulled out flamethrowers and rocket launchers.
"If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other," pleaded Sam, "and don't kill the actors either."
But the police showed up in helicopters and soon the amphitheater was littered with corpses.
"I wonder if you could actually stage something here," mused Mark, and when Sam responded that it'd be difficult because gamers blow stuff up and shoot people, he countered that "people are violent in Shakespeare. It's brutal. Like in Hamlet, everyone dies. It's perfect."
Sam's wife, Pinny Grylls, is a documentary filmmaker. She started recording everything — this film is technically a documentary — and offered to help them film an in-game promotional video to get other gamers involved.
When the video shoot became a battleground, it worked better than any of them expected. Several random gamers showed up to audition, including a Tunisian whose avatar was a naked green alien. He hadn't memorized any Shakespeare but recited a bit of the Quran.
It soon became clear that performing in the amphitheater didn't make sense when all the digital world's a stage, so they started staging Act Two in a subway, Act Four atop a high-flying blimp where the real challenge was not falling to their deaths every few lines.
"It's like Shakespeare on a billion-dollar budget," someone notes.
Also intriguing is the mid-pandemic camaraderie that reassures the out-of-work principals. They have understandable bouts of melancholy — ones that track so well with the lines they speak as the melancholy Dane that it doesn't always sound like they're "acting."
It all adds up to a unique Hamlet, and I say that as a theater critic who's caught 37 before this, not one of them with flamethrowers, rocket launchers or flying DeLoreans. The film Grand Theft Hamlet is constantly surprising, breathtakingly imaginative, and a great introduction to Shakespeare — or, I guess, to video games — whichever you need introducing to.
Copyright 2025 NPR
