As the sun sets, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen look out over a near-empty amphitheatre. “This is William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I believe it’s the first time it’s ever been performed at the Vinewood Bowl,” Crane tells their two audience members, one of whom immediately murders the other. “If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other,” Crane pleads. “And don’t kill the actors either.” A police helicopter lands on stage. Unmitigated bloodshed ensues.
So ends Crane and Oosterveen’s first attempt to stage Hamlet inside the hugely successful satirical video game Grand Theft Auto V. Hamlet’s dynastic revenge plot is a good match for the game’s anarchic open world, even if the game’s dialogue lacks some of the Bard’s lyricism: “No, I don’t miss your 10-inch dick,” one non-playable character can be heard saying. “You know why? Because you sold my dog for crack!”
“It is the rotten state of Denmark,” says Pinny Grylls, director of the new documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, of the game’s setting, San Andreas. “The Globe would have been noisy and smelly, people would have thrown apples if the actors were shit. There would have probably been somebody arrested, there would have been prostitutes – literally like Grand Theft Auto.” It is fitting, then, that Crane and Oosterveen staged Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy – “To be or not to be” – in a run-down dive bar populated by addicts and down-on-their-luck punters.
When Covid lockdowns shuttered the UK’s theatres, Crane and Oosterveen – who are both actors in reality – began exploring the possibility that they could stage theatre performances within GTA. Film-maker Grylls, who is married to Crane, saw the makings of a documentary in their project. They began to hold auditions within the game, with amateurs and professionals, gamers and actors, all turning up to the Vinewood Bowl amphitheatre.
Crane remembers being in the game, “looking at these people on stage, telling me the story of this hundreds-of-years-old text.” “I could get a sense of the different people’s characters coming through,” he adds. “Not just the fictional characters, but who they were as people.”
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There’s DJ Phil89: a Hamlet-loving literary agent and GTA novice who was borrowing her nephew’s account to audition; his shirtless male avatar shows up in a top hat, aviator sunglasses and board shorts. And Lizzie Wofford, AKA Woffdawg: an actor and voice artist from London who recites Brutus’s Act 2, Scene 1 monologue. “Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius. To cut the head off and then hack the limbs,” she says, using the game’s “emote” function to dramatically thrust a large Bowie knife.
Many special interest communities have formed within Grand Theft Auto since it went online more than a decade ago (the franchise’s first entry debuted in 1997). Others have also used the in-game camera mechanics and game engine to make “machinima” films – a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema”. Before she “shot” Grand Theft Hamlet on her character’s phone, Grylls had previously “spent a long time on my own just walking around as an avatar recording, going on a sort of nature photography expedition.”
Grand Theft Hamlet is a meta story, but so is Shakespeare’s tragedy: Hamlet famously features its own play-within-a-play narrative, resulting in “Inception levels” of meta in the film, says Crane.
“Shakespeare constantly refers to the fact that a play is an artificial representation of life, that ‘we are mere players on the stage’,” Grylls adds. “I felt like the game world was a stage … we were wearing masks, dressing up as these avatars, versions of ourselves.”
Between breaks in mayhem, the cast open up about their real life struggles. Oosterveen is childless, single and alone in lockdown and has just lost his last relative; Crane and Grylls’ marriage becomes strained by the amount of time they spend in-game, to the detriment of their real world relationship. And production hurdles are heightened by the constant threat of assassination by random players stumbling on their rehearsals.
“In some respects, you want this safe, clean environment which you can experiment in, take risks and you don’t have a fear of being judged. But there is something really theatrically powerful about being in a space where you don’t have that, where you’re on the edge of chaos all the time,” says Crane.
Grand Theft Hamlet, which won the documentary feature category at this year’s SXSW, is ultimately a celebration of the dedication, vulnerability and trust involved in the creative act. Under fire from a vast array of projectiles, the production’s noble mission inspires some mysterious, altruistic players who show up to serve as protectors and bodyguards, defending the cast from would-be killers while never revealing their identities.
“GTA is a world where violence is absolutely de rigueur. But sometimes you scratch the surface and you find someone who wants to help you out, protect you and engage with you,” Crane says. “You actually get a glimpse of kindness, care and humanity.”