‘Grand Theft Hamlet’ Stages Shakespeare in a Land of Shootouts

Tucked away in the hills of Los Santos, a wondrous and lawless land, is the Vinewood Bowl, a gigantic amphitheater that typically sits empty. Modeled after the real-life Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, it is a somewhat hidden space, even for seasoned players of the video game Grand Theft Auto Online.

When Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work London actors, happened upon the site while playing the game during a coronavirus pandemic lockdown in 2021, their thespian curiosity took over.

“I wonder if you could actually stage something here,” Crane’s avatar muses at the start of the documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet.”

So begins a ludicrous journey to making one of the weirdest versions of one of the most performed pieces of literature: a staging of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” entirely within the universe of Grand Theft Auto. In this production, a tortured soliloquy may be interrupted by a rocket launcher fired by a digital avatar wearing a galaxy-print onesie.

“This film for me is the juxtaposition of high art and low art,” Oosterveen said during a recent group video call.

Part absurdist making-of doc, part postmodern inquiry, “Grand Theft Hamlet” takes place entirely within a game known for its unhinged violence. It tracks Crane and Oosterveen’s struggles to mount their virtual production, including bizarre online auditions with strangers and determining how best to jump from a building onto a blimp. The surreal form comes to enliven Shakespeare, while also revealing the inner conflicts of its players amid the bleak times of isolation.

“It’s like a bromance, actually,” said Pinny Grylls, a documentary filmmaker who directed the film with Crane.

“About two loser actors,” Crane added with a laugh (he is married to Grylls).

Crane had been cast as the lead in the West End production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” before the pandemic paused things indefinitely. During lockdown, he was struck by how the YouTube gaming videos his son was watching resembled a form of theater.

“There’s this kind of live performance element to it, watching people play games online,” Crane said.

Bored and without much gaming experience, he reached out to Oosterveen, a seasoned gamer and fellow actor he had worked with before, to explore the vague idea of making an art piece. They began experimenting, recording hours of their gameplay within Grand Theft Auto Online, a multiplayer extension of Grand Theft Auto V.

They spent a couple of days choreographing an extensive interpretive dance routine. They did a livestream commentary of a soccer game on a casino rooftop. After a YouTube video of their adventures gained some traction online, they decided to seriously run with their idea of staging “Hamlet,” a play in which — mirroring their setting — everyone dies.

Eventually, Crane brought Grylls into the game to document their journey. Using only in-game tools, Grylls lent the film both an organic view of gameplay and a cinematic, often contemplative eye.

“I spent a long time literally wandering around on my own and just being inside the space, looking at the light and how it changed, all the different landscapes and also the nonplayable characters,” Grylls said. Those NPCs, the computerized stock characters who populate the game, “became almost like silent witnesses to what was happening.”

A scene featuring Crane’s recitation of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy overlays in-game scenes of quiet desperation: nameless figures cowering in a bar, wearily taking a smoke break, begging for money.

The uncanny form provides an eerily apt view of Shakespearean tragedy and an increasingly disorienting post-Covid existence. “You want it to reflect the world, but not completely,” said Oosterveen, who also served as an associate director. “Something needs to be awry.”

The film follows Crane and Oosterveen’s obsessive reclusion into the game amid lockdown, reflecting the strange reality of the digital space. In one raw moment, Grylls enters the game to confront her husband after he skipped her birthday celebration because of online rehearsals for the production.

Yet the film also challenges perceptions of online gaming as toxic and isolating. The actors find community in a dedicated cast and crew, some of whom were trained actors and some simply strangers who turned out to be remarkable and versatile performers.

Crane (who plays Hamlet) and Oosterveen (Polonius) compared the technical experience of acting within the game to that of a puppeteer, reciting lines while toggling buttons so their avatars could display emotions.

Their experiment culminated in a live show that drew a few hundred viewers (and later, thousands on YouTube) and won a handful of awards, including the innovation award at the Stage Awards, a major theater celebration in Britain.

But the greatest achievement, perhaps, was that they improbably pulled off a full run-through of “Hamlet” in a world of pixelated chaos.

“There’s a line in the film where I say, ‘The blimp exploded and everybody died, but apart from that, everything was OK,’” Oosterveen said. “I didn’t even mean that as a joke. That is literally the only thing really that went wrong.”