Tucked away in the incredible and lawless hills of Los Santos, Vinewood Bowl is a gigantic amphitheater that is usually empty. Modeled after the real-life Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, this location is a little hidden, even for seasoned players of the video game Grand Theft Auto Online.
In 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, Sam Crane and Marc Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors in London, discovered the site by chance while playing a game. My curiosity as a person took over.
“Maybe we could actually stage something here,” Crane's avatar thinks at the beginning of the documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet.”
So begins a humorous journey to create one of the strangest versions of one of the most performed works of literature. It is a production of Shakespeare's “Hamlet'' completely within the world of Grand Theft Auto. In this film, his torturous soliloquy is sometimes interrupted by a rocket launcher fired by a digital avatar wearing a galaxy-print costume.
“For me, this film is a juxtaposition of high art and low art,” Oosterveen said during a recent group video call.
Part absurdist making-of document, part postmodern investigation, “Grand Theft Hamlet” takes place entirely within a game known for its unbridled violence. The film follows Crane and Oosterveen's struggles to launch a virtual production, including bizarre online auditions with strangers and deciding the best way to jump from buildings to airships. The surreal forms enliven Shakespeare while also revealing the players' inner conflicts in this dark and isolated era.
“It's actually kind of a bromance,” said documentary filmmaker Pinny Grylls, who directed the film with Crane.
“There's a couple of underdog actors,” Crane added with a laugh (he is married to Grylls).
Crane had been cast in the lead role in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child before the pandemic shut down the production indefinitely. During lockdown, he was struck by how the gaming videos his son was watching on YouTube resembled a kind of theater play.
“There's a live performance element of watching people play the game online,” Crane said.
Bored and without much gaming experience, he reached out to Oosterveen, a veteran gamer and fellow actor with whom he had previously worked, to explore the vague idea of creating a piece of art. They began experimenting, recording hours of gameplay within Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer expansion for Grand Theft Auto V.
They spent several days choreographing widely interpreted dance routines. They did a live stream commentary of a soccer match on the rooftop of the casino. After a YouTube video depicting their adventures gained traction online, they decided to seriously pursue the idea of staging a play, Hamlet, in which everyone dies, reflecting their setting. .
Eventually, Crane brought Grylls into the game and recorded their journey. Using only in-game tools, Grylls gave the film both an organic perspective of gameplay and a cinematic, often meditative perspective.
“I spent a lot of time literally walking around by myself, just being in the space, looking at the light and how it changes, the different landscapes, and the non-playable characters,” Grylls said. spoke. These NPCs, computerized stock characters in the game, “became like silent witnesses to what was going on.”
The scene where Crane recites his “to be or not to be” monologue overlaps with scenes of quiet despair in the game. Nameless characters hunker down in a bar, tired and smoking cigarettes, begging for money.
This eerie form is an eerily appropriate representation of Shakespeare's tragedy and our increasingly chaotic post-COVID-19 life. “We want to reflect the world, but not completely,” said Oosterveen, who also served as assistant director. “Something must be wrong.”
The film depicts Crane and Oosterveen's obsession with gaming during the lockdown, reflecting the strange reality of the digital space. In one graphic moment, Grylls gamely joins in and confronts her husband after he misses her birthday celebration due to online rehearsals.
But the film also challenges the perception that online gaming is harmful and isolating. The actors found a community in a dedicated cast and crew, some trained actors and others just strangers, who later became surprisingly versatile performers.
Crane (Hamlet) and Oosterveen (Polonius) likened the technical experience of acting in a game to that of a puppeteer, reciting lines while toggling buttons to help an avatar express emotion.
Their experimentation culminated in a live show that attracted hundreds of viewers (later thousands on YouTube) and won several awards, including the Innovation Award at the Stage Awards, the UK's leading theater festival. I did.
But perhaps his greatest achievement was impossibly completing the entirety of “Hamlet'' in a world of pixelated chaos.
“There's a line in the movie that says, 'The airship exploded and everyone died, but everything else was okay,'” Oosterveen said. “I'm not kidding. That's literally the only thing that really went wrong.”
