Two British actors bring the Bard to the virtual streets, blending high culture with chaos in ‘Grand Theft Hamlet.’
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
All the world’s a (virtual) stage in “Grand Theft Hamlet,” a hybrid mash-up of Shakespeare and “Grand Theft Auto,” one of the best-selling video franchises in the world. Using a technique known as “machinima,” two British actors, Sam Crane (“Napoleon”) and Mark Oosterveen (“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”), who are under lockdown during the pandemic and not working, decide to try to cast, rehearse and produce William Shakespeare’s most famous play “Hamlet” within the virtual world of “Grand Theft Auto.” Shakespeare is violent, as the actors observe once or twice.
But Grand Theft Auto is, as the world knows and loves, crazy violent. One of the amusing side effects of the experiment is that people disguised as their GTA avatars keep showing up and beating up or killing virtual actors as they work. The film boasts a score by Jamie Perera and pieces by Gabriel Fauvre. I’m not convinced that it’s 100% worthwhile to watch a reproduction of the video game’s virtual space on a movie screen.
But I must give it to Crane, Oosterveen, and Crane’s co-director, wife, and fellow actor Pinny Grylls for their daring, ingenuity, and pluck in coming up with the idea and going through with it. While it’s true that they do not come even close to adapting Hamlet in its entirety, which can run over four hours on stage. But they get the gist (even if we hear the “To be or not to be” soliloquy way more than necessary), and they do keep getting interrupted by killers with vehicles and weapons. Someone needs to have it explained to them that Harry Potter is not in “Hamlet.”
The film, which won the best documentary jury prize at the 2024 SXSW Festival, boasts other amusing bits. After being cast as Hamlet, the young, real-life actor-player Dipo Ola (“Landscapers”) has to request a smaller role because he has found a job (he eventually is recast as Laertes). Sam and Mark are rightfully partial to the famous—“Life’s but a walking shadow”—speech from “Macbeth” which ends with the lines, arguably among the most nihilistic and memorable in literary history, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That William Faulkner took those lines and transformed them into his monumental 1929 novel “The Sound and the Fury” is worth remembering.
Amid shootings, sirens, blimps arriving and departing, various muscle cars, a golf cart and a DeLorean, Sam and Mark are able to recruit players interested in appearing in their production to play such characters as Ophelia (Tilly Steele, TV’s “Victoria”), Gertrude, (videogame actor Lizzie Wofford), Horatio (Jen Cohn, TV’s “Welcome to Chippendales”) and the Ghost (Jeremiah O’Connor). They all have their gaming tags and real names, such as Mystery Fedora, Rustic Mascara, and DJ Phil. Among the places the cast likes to go are the casino and a dive bar, where everyone is likely to get shot. One of the two actors/producers writes to the National Theater for funding or any other help.
Mark laments that while Dipo has found a real job, he has a “nonsense job.” In the lower left-hand corner of the screen, we see a readout of the people who have left or been killed in the game. Why doesn’t Shakespeare have this? Someone throws out Baz Luhrmann (“Romeo + Juliet”) as a model. What does the line “To be or not to be” mean if you’re a character in a video game? A sign on the screen says, “Impotent Rage.” Mark and Sam practice their lines sitting in a virtual hot tub on a mega yacht. The performance is scheduled for July 4, 2022. The invitations go out. “Our revels now are ended.” But this is the age of the celebrity after-party. “Grand Theft Auto” is a major British export. This might explain why none of the virtual players at the party can dance.
‘Grand Theft Hamlet’
Rating: R for language and some violence.
Cast: Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen, Pinny Grylls
Director: Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls
Writers: Crane, Grylls
Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Where to Watch: Alamo Drafthouse Seaport
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 