Grand Theft Hamlet review: something rotten

There is a reason the plays of William Shakespeare continue to hold such cultural currency over 400 years after the writer’s death. His stories — stretched across histories, comedies, and tragedies — are achingly relatable portrayals of the human experience in all its facets. It is why Romeo and Juliet can work as a musical in 50’s New York or Macbeth can be transported to feudal Japan. Shakespeare is timeless. So who’s to say it wouldn’t work inside of a video game?

That’s exactly the premise of Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary that chronicles two actors’ tumultuous attempt during the Covid-19 pandemic to stage the bard’s famous tragedy entirely within Rockstar’s multiplayer sandbox, Grand Theft Auto Online. Staging the existential story in the midst of a pandemic when the future of live theater is uncertain is a compelling hook, but this struggle is never given enough screen time over the course of the documentary’s brisk 91 minute runtime

Grand Theft Hamlet bounces between grand philosophizing about life (Hamlet would be proud) and inviting the audience to laugh at just how wacky video games can be in comparison to the high art of theater. What gets lost in between are the human moments that make evident the universal desire for community that both theater and online gaming can provide.

Anyone can act

The opening of Grand Theft Hamlet sees out of work actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen in the middle of a session of Grand Theft Auto Online. While fleeing from the cops — the entire documentary is shot in-game — the two stumble upon the Vinewood Bowl, a large open-air amphitheater. After reciting some monologues and jumping around, an idea forms: What if the duo staged a live production of Hamlet here? It’s not like the two, stuck at home during UK lockdown’s in 2021, are doing any other acting. But the logistics of such an undertaking soon lead to a number of complications.

The first hurdle is rounding up a cast. A full production of Hamlet requires around two dozen performers when one without some people doubling up on roles. When their first attempts at bringing random players into the fold go array, including several over-the-top deaths at the hands of potential auditionees, Crane and Oosterveen put out the call online. This garners much more success, as a handful of hopefuls show up to answer the call.

The auditions are the first great moment of Grand Theft Hamlet. In short interviews we learn about the motley crew that will become our cast. There is a professional voice actor (Overwatch’s Jen Cohn) but also full-time parents, real-life friends of Crane and Oosterveen, and a literary agent that has commandeered her nephew’s account to fulfill a long-held dream of acting. Some performers dress for the part and others time slashes of knives to the climactic moments of their monologue. Watching the in-game models awkwardly gesticulate and emote to the words of Shakespeare (as heard over fuzzy voice chat) is jarring at first but soon feels natural as the timeless prose takes center stage. Maybe this wild idea just might work.

Even these poignant moments come with the drawbacks of being in a lawless public forum like Grand Theft Auto. Weapons go off, actors accidentally kill each other midline, and eventually the cops show up to ruin it all. This is the major juxtaposition Grand Theft Hamlet constantly leans into. A meeting of high and low art, and how comedic it is to see actors get blown to high heaven. Crane and Oosterveen claim early on that this replicates a true Shakespeare experience in many ways. The material of Hamlet itself is incredibly violent, something that the world of Grand Theft Auto Online provides in spades. Yet the camera of Grand Theft Hamlet never imbues the unpredictable violence of Los Santos with anything but humor. “Isn’t this funny” it seems to ask the viewer every single time an accidental death occurs, of which there are countless. It takes away from Oosterveen and Crane’s claims about this replicating the original experience of seeing Hamlet at The Old Globe, and it frames it as a contrast between serious (theater) and unserious (video games) art forms.

Reality and fiction blend

There is something to be said for how the endless parade of death in Grand Theft Hamlet more aptly speaks to the experience felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. Crane and Oosterveen, and the cast they have assembled, are doing their best to create something in the shadow of unimaginable loss. Between rehearsals for the play, we see the real world bleed into Grand Theft Auto Online. In a solemn moment between Oosterveen and Pinny Grylls  (co-director of the documentary, source of the majority of in-game footage, and Crane’s wife) that he recently attended the funeral of his last blood relative. In this moment he is digitally present with Grylls, but in the real-world he is alone in his apartment while also being alone in a much more existential definition. It is heartbreaking.

These moments of reality often cause just as much disruption to the production of Hamlet as any of the unpredictable mayhem of Grand Theft Auto Online. In a low-point for Crane and Oosterveen, their Hamlet breaks the news that he has gotten a job and must quiet the production since he no longer has the time. Crane and Oosterveen, standing in a subway station constantly humming with arriving and departing trains, break down in an argument. Maybe this production is foolish, maybe it has no purpose. It leads to a feud between the duo. And what should feel as real as the other poignant moments of Grand Theft Hamlet only shows one of the documentary’s glaring flaws: Much like the play they are attempting to perform, it all feels rehearsed.

Crane and Oosterveen are actors, and you can feel them punching up their dialogue in these moments about the “real-world.” While the work of Shakespeare helps to break down the uncanny valley of the digital world, these scenes do the opposite. They pull me back to the auditions in which players carefully prepared their emotes and actions to reflect their words. To sync action and voice in this online space takes preparation, meaning when Crane angrily punches the air or avoids “looking” at Oosterveen by getting a drink from a vending machine it reads as far too choreographed, with on the nose dialogue. Maybe these fights between the two and existential outbursts did happen, but what we see in Grand Theft Hamlet comes across as a theatrical retelling that lacks emotional rawness. The two often go for a tone that clearly is meant to mirror the melodrama of Hamlet, when their circumstances really feel more akin to the meandering and often comedic existentialism of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Lack of intent

But the play’s the thing, so just how does the cast’s many hours of rehearsal pay off? In all honesty, Grand Theft Hamlet doesn’t seem very interested in showing you exactly how it all shake’s out. The few tidbits of the incoherent live performance we do see near the documentary’s end are filled with bazookas, sports cars, and even a blimp flying through the sky. Crane and Oosterveen lean into the spectacle Los Santos affords without thinking about how it deepens their take on Hamlet

As for the performances, most of them are fairly weak. Though I’m not actually mad about that. Outside of Crane, Oosterveen, and Cohn, nobody in the cast is a professional actor. Rather than the Royal Shakespeare Company this production is more like seeing your local community theater’s version of Hamlet. Which is great! For most of these people, putting on a Tony worthy performance isn’t the most important thing, it’s about the friendship that this adventure has given them. It speaks to the importance of theater as a tool for building community, something that it shares with online games. Especially in a global pandemic that made all of us more lonely than we had ever been, Grand Theft Auto Online stands in for all the online spaces that allowed for people to spend time together.

That doesn’t seem to be the takeaway for Crane and Oosterveen however. With Hamlet successfully performed in game and lockdown’s being lifted the two look forward to life back in the real-world, at which point their artistic and communal adventures within Grand Theft Auto Online will likely come to an end. It reads almost as a reminder to get outside and touch grass. Much of Grand Theft Hamlet feels like this, with Crane and Oosterveen acting as temporary visitors to online digital spaces only out of necessity. As a side-effect of the film focusing more on the duo as it goes on, we also get less and less of those compelling human stories that the cast bring to the table.

All the world’s a stage

This is perhaps my greatest frustration with Grand Theft Hamlet. Theater and video games are such artistic siblings in their interactivity and community, but those connective threads aren’t openly acknowledged by Crane and Oosterveen. Much like other projects from non-gaming people wading into this world, the whole premise also comes from an uninformed place of self-aggrandizement. The duo constantly talk about the accomplishment of performing Shakespeare in Grand Theft Auto Online as having never been done before. That might be true of Grand Theft Auto Online, but it isn’t true of video games at large.

Dedicated theater troupes in Final Fantasy 14 have been putting on theatrical performances to full-houses for years — I attended one in 2020 — including productions of Shakespeare. Also in 2020, Celine Song (writer and director of Past Lives) mounted a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull entirely in The Sims 4 that expertly put the two mediums into a conversation about the ephemeral nature of stories told within both. Furthermore, Crane and Oosterveen ignore the thriving roleplaying scene that Grand Theft Auto Online has nurtured since its release. It might not be Shakespeare, but it requires the same communal effort from a dedicated group of players wanting to make something of their own within the sandbox.

Crane and Oosterveen constantly seem to believe that due to their theatrical background they are bringing an heir of seriousness to what they see as a silly world. To quote the bard, the two see Grand Theft Auto Online as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In the end it leaves Grand Theft Hamlet feeling much the same.

Grand Theft Hamlet will be available to stream via MUBI on February 21.