I often played Grand Theft Auto (GTA) during my teenage years. A game where the violence hiding in the corner of your mind is possible to accomplish without any real-life consequences, which is what excited me and most of the players of this game. Subconsciously, giving in to a world without morals and activating the Freudian Id of my brain. Consciously, it was just a fun game, where you could just steal cars and drive them, apply cheat codes, explore fictional cities based in US, beat up people, carry out heists, run away from police, and do anything that’s unimaginable for you to do in reality.
A documentary-style film now streaming on MUBI tells us that all of this is quite Shakespearean? Grand Theft Hamlet, a candid, hilarious in-game film that follows three people attempting to stage Hamlet inside GTA is truly one-of-a-kind. During the 2021 pandemic lockdown, theater actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, both out of work, were doing the usual GTA things—stealing cars and shooting people—when they stumbled upon an outdoor theater in the game, prompting the idea to stage Hamlet. Pinny Grylls, a filmmaker and Crane’s spouse, joins them in a Tilda Swinton-like character to document the absurd process as they audition, rehearse, and stream the play—all interrupted with bullets striking on them. While the makers dodge killers, they form an online troupe of gamers who want to play a role in the Hamlet.
The film points out that Hamlet and GTA have a lot of similarities except that one uses iambic pentameter and Shakespearean words that makes us search through the dictionary and other filled with 21st-century cuss words. Mark in the film notes that ‘people are violent in Shakespeare. It's brutal. Like in Hamlet, everyone dies. It's perfect.’ Both worlds of extreme violence present an uncanny similarity of life and death. In Hamlet, all of the characters end up killing each other and in GTA one is stuck in the loop of a death spree.
Imagine scenes from Hamlet set on a private yacht, Ophelia's death unfolding in a swanky swimming pool, and Lucianus blowing up the king with a rocket launcher instead of poison. Interestingly, Act 4 takes place on a high-flying blimp, where the actors must carefully avoid falling with every move. ‘It’s like a billion-dollar production of Hamlet,’ one crew member remarks.
As Mark, Sam and Pinny begin with the process auditioning, we meet a range of characters appearing in their chosen selves. There’s a delivery driver with a broken leg who’s finding a way to pass time in hospital bed with this game; a trans actress named Nora, who finds freedom from discrimination in this online production and makes dramatic entries. We also meet an Arabic Finnish-Tunisian gamer, ParTeb, in an alien suit, shaking his butt in the audition. When he’s asked to recite a speech from Shakespeare, he recites a passage from the Quran because he doesn’t know any Shakespeare.
Along with such instances of a diverse cast coming together with their own quirks, we see the creators indulge in moments of existentialism as they go on to become obsessed with the video game. For childless and single Mark, who has no family to return to during the pandemic and lives alone, the production becomes everything. Similarly, Sam, also out of work, feels directionless and questions his involvement in this virtual production that may not even be real. When Dipo Ola, who landed the lead role of Hamlet, gets a real job and can't commit to the role, it sparks arguments rooted in the fear of wasting their time in a virtual experiment. In an argument, Pinny points out that Sam has been spending too much time on the game, leaving no time for their family. With some of these scenes giving out a feeling of being scripted because they were recreated, the film finds the philosophical element in the absurd and puts across an important question—does all of this even make sense?
Hamlet’s famous—‘To be or not to be? That is the question’—resurfaces repeatedly in the film as Sam rehearses it while gamers try to kill him, making us ponder over this bogus idea in a capitalist world. The film focuses on the contradiction of human life where there’s beauty among the people who want to help the makers in an inherently cruel space. In a way, GTA becomes a space where the crew actually puts up a fight against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’
Bringing attention to the much averted gaming community, the film forces us to see the gamers beyond dark circled screen addict loners. It shatters conventional notions of art, highlighting how, even in a pandemic-stricken world that locked us in our rooms, the desire to create and find community persists. As the lead cast puts it, ‘You can’t stop art, motherfuckers’, while dodging the bullets, metaphorically everything in this world that stops us from creating.
Words Paridhi Badgotri
Date 21.02.2025