Grand Theft Hamlet review: a hilarious and moving treat about staging Shakespeare in the notoriously violent video game

You think Coppola had it tough with Martin Sheen’s breakdown and heart attack while making Apocalypse Now? Or the Fitzcarraldo shoot was tricky with Werner Herzog plotting to kill Klaus Kinski during filming?

Pah! A walk in the park. On this production of Hamlet, an alien had to to patrol the skies in a military gunship to fend off the hordes of gun-toting killers regularly blowing away cast members.

Of course, no one actually died. As this documentary opens to a dark screen, a faint, rhythmic padding can be heard. For those who know, it’s the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the video game Grand Theft Auto.

It is this hyper-violent online world where out-of-work London actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen chose to stage a live performance of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The resulting account of their endeavours (filmed entirely within the game) turns out to be an utterly hilarious and unexpectedly moving treat.

It’s 2021, the world, and the film industry in particular, are under Covid lockdown. Crane and Oosterveen have taken to filling their empty days by playing Grand Theft Auto together; a little bit of random slaughter, exploring this vast digital environment and chatting about their lives and careers (of lack thereof).

On one jaunt, they discover a huge open-air theatre. Jokingly, but presciently, one of them ponders the idea of staging a play there: “It’s Covid, this is outdoors, it’s perfect!” They reel off a few lines of Hamlet on stage and within seconds the lurid-pink-clad avatar of another player arrives.

They are thrilled; they have an audience! Then the character strides over, peppering them with gunfire. The cops arrive, all weapons blazing and promptly we have two dead actors on stage. Laugh-out-loud may be a cliché, but that’s what myself and most of the cinema audience were doing. As our actors point out, it’s puzzlingly remarkable how funny everyone playing GTA finds the act of virtual killing.

Unperturbed, the pair push ahead with putting on a production of Hamlet, enlisting Crane’s film-maker wife Pinny Grylls into the project. They host auditions, but most auditionees turn out just to want to blow their heads off.

They are given rays of encouragement, such as when “DJ Phil” comes storming on to their stage, topless, top-hatted and seemingly intent on malevolent deeds; but who turns out to be a mother and literary agent who adores Hamlet. Our alien is “ParTeb” (in real life somewhere in Finland), a god-awful actor whose main obsession seems to be shaking his ass, and who is eventually given the job of security chief.

As expected, it’s a chaotic, almost impossible challenge to get this show off the ground (cast members are constantly shuffling off this mortal coil). And there are genuinely moving moments when Crane and Oosterveen discuss the deep, worrying woes of their real-life circumstances (“I have of late… lost all my mirth”); or when Grylls accuses Crane of neglecting their real family.

However, what makes this wickedly entertaining is how ridiculously amusing it is, and how such an incredibly stupid proposition ended up being so watchable. Did their Hamlet ever actually get to be or not to be? You’ll have to watch and see…

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