Grand Theft Hamlet: Shakespeare Staged Inside GTA Online, Where Even the Director Can Be Killed

In the third UK lockdown, two out-of-work actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, decided to stage Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto Online. They did it in a game best known for heists, yacht purchases and gunfire. The result is Grand Theft Hamlet, a machinima documentary now being revisited by GamesRadar+ as GTA 6 approaches.

The obvious question is why. Lockdown had its share of questionable pursuits, from couch-to-5K to banana bread to Tiger King. Crane's answer is that Grand Theft Auto is notorious even among people who have never played it, mostly for its extreme violence. When he started playing, he found the game chaotic and violent but also incredibly beautiful. That mix, he says, hit the nail on the head of how Hamlet sees the world.

Co-director Pinny Grylls, who is both camera operator and the interrogating filmmaker on screen, says Crane told her early on that this was the perfect place for the play. In her view, the rotten state of Denmark resembles Los Santos: a dog-eat-dog world, one she says would look like this if Donald Trump had designed it.

The production was shot entirely with the tools GTA Online provides: first-person view, director mode and the in-game phone camera. That brought problems no conventional film set has. Part of the audience carried guns. Grylls's eyes were the streaming viewpoint, so she had to avoid dying, and if she respawned near the production, that was fine. She says they knew something would go wrong. Crane adds that they might be shot, or the audience might think they were rubbish, and that the sense of anything happening from one moment to the next, someone turning up and blowing you away, is exciting and dramatic.

Rockstar Games learned of the project quite early, according to Crane. The company was not involved but was, in his words, really supportive and appreciated them as fans. He says reaching the studio was hard, but they managed it in the end. He thinks Rockstar liked seeing the game used as a creative sandbox, which is what it was designed for. Grylls says she doesn't think the makers ever expected anyone to put on Hamlet in there, and believes they were delighted.

Over the film, Sam and Mark gather a cast of players for the final performance, which Grylls calls a miracle given that the UK was coming out of lockdown and people were returning to their lives. They include Nora, who recently came out as trans to their family; Lizzy, a sharp player who immediately grasps the quirks of GTA Online's janky animations; and ParTeb, who wears an alien suit, rides a jet and serves as the play's heavy-hitting security.

Beneath the spectacle, Grylls probes the mental states of both lead actors. Crane and Grylls are married with two children, and marital arguments surface on screen. Mark, living alone during lockdown, struggles with the project. The film becomes a meditation on male loneliness and connection through gaming. Grylls says game spaces increasingly offer people who find it hard to talk about feelings a safe place to make friends. She admits she was judgmental of such spaces and wants the film to show she has changed her mind. She likens it to a Withnail and I kind of story about two vulnerable men and how they feel about the world.

The piece leaves the play's outcome for viewers to discover. Afterward, Crane describes relief and a real sense of achievement, followed by a question: we've done that, so what now? He calls it a slightly deflationary feeling familiar to anyone who has finished a big creative endeavor, a slight blues after the high of having done it.