In 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were whiling away the Covid lockdowns in GTA Online when they had an idea: “Why not stage Hamlet inside the game?” They recorded hundreds of hours of in-game attempts to perform Shakespeare amid the chaos of GTA 5 and put together a feature-length documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, which has now won multiple awards, earned a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and will premiere in US theaters on January 17.
The film is already in a number of UK theaters, and was first shown at SXSW back in March, where it won Best Documentary Feature. Crane and co-director Pinny Grylls also picked up a couple of British Independent Film Awards.
The juxtaposition of a violent, chaotic videogame and Hamlet creates an obvious tension, though the amphitheater in GTA 5’s Los Santos isn’t necessarily all that different from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, says Grylls.
“There’s a certain thing, the irreverence of the fact that the people we were meeting didn’t really give a shit,” Grylls said in a recent interview with Radio Times. “You [co-director Sam Crane] said to me very early on, ‘It feels like I went back in time to the Globe 500 years ago where people would just throw apples at you … or there were prostitutes coming and going, and people were selling stuff.’ The theater in Shakespeare’s time was like that. It was popular entertainment. It wasn’t a dark room where everyone had to be quiet.”
We already know, of course, how much meaning and comedy can be found in the ways players interact in online games, and GTA Online has been a particularly fertile ground for dramatic roleplaying. Perhaps PC Gamer contributor Joe Donnelly didn’t approach “I tried to rob a jewellery store as a blind drunk Bad Santa in a GTA 5 roleplay server” with a mind to seek the “moments of pathos, emotion, and lyricism” that the Grand Theft Hamlet website promises, but you know, same kind of thing.
Outside of Red vs. Blue, I can’t think of another obvious instance of machinima getting a theatrical release, and reviews for Grand Theft Hamlet are positive so far. Empire called the film a “riotously funny, unexpectedly poignant ode to gaming, Shakespeare, the indestructible nature of art, and the benefits of befriending bazooka wielding extraterrestrials.”
Grand Theft Hamlet is not available to stream right now, but will presumably be available on Mubi, which owns the subscription streaming rights, sometime after the US theatrical release in January.