Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary movie, type of. It’s additionally an experimental theater venture. It’s additionally a rough-and-ready feature-length machinima, made totally in-game in Grand Theft Auto On-line. It’s additionally a slapstick comedy of errors about three associates attempting to fill an empty interval of their lives by staging a manufacturing of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside this chaotic on-line house. It’s a wierd, humorous, and even poignant movie that takes place in a dreamlike house between gaming and theater.
In January 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen had been out of labor and depressed. The U.Ok.’s third COVID-19 lockdown had begun, and London theaters had been shut once more. Crane had been resulting from begin a run as Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Baby on the West Finish, which might have supported his household for a 12 months, however that likelihood was shot now. Oosterveen was single, rootless, and had simply began attempting to get again to work after dropping his father to a protracted battle with Alzheimer’s.
“We had been buggered,” Crane’s spouse, filmmaker Pinny Grylls, who co-directed Grand Theft Hamlet with Crane, advised Polygon.
There was nothing to be completed in regards to the state of affairs besides play video video games. Oosterveen, the gamer of the trio, confirmed his pal round Grand Theft Auto On-line on PlayStation. Crane and Grylls hadn’t performed video games since they had been children, however had purchased a PlayStation for his or her son the 12 months earlier than, considerably reluctantly. “We argued about it,” Grylls mentioned.
Crane initially had misgivings about GTA. “You simply assume, Oh yeah, that’s that one that’s tremendous violent, and there’s no redeeming traits to it in any respect,” he mentioned. “After which after I began taking part in it, I used to be shocked at how stunning it was, and the way enjoyable it was, and the way releasing it was to play, and the way broad it was.”
Picture: Mubi
Crane wasn’t getting into fully blind, although, and he wasn’t purely killing time, both. He was conscious of the role-play and machinima communities in gaming, and eager about exploring them as a efficiency house. “I didn’t fairly know what we had been going to do in there — thought perhaps we would simply try to do some bizarre little YouTube skits or one thing like that,” he mentioned.
Responding to this obscure impulse, Crane and Oosterveen began capturing footage of their gameplay earlier than they actually knew what they had been doing. That’s why, at first of Grand Theft Hamlet, we are able to watch in actual time because the pair come across the Vinewood Bowl open-air theater within the hills of Los Santos, and come across the thought of performing Shakespeare there. Quickly, they invited Grylls to affix them in-game to doc their efforts.
At first, it looks as if a joke, suggesting that any actor encountering a brand new house instantly envisions themselves standing there in entrance of individuals, reciting “To be or to not be.” And there’s an apparent tradition conflict between Shakespearean tragedy and the crude violence and low-culture irreverence of GTA. The film will get nice comedian mileage from rehearsals being interrupted by drive-by shootings and rocket-launcher accidents. However the trio additionally felt they had been taking an unconventional route again to Shakespeare’s roots.
Grylls mentioned Crane laid it out: “[Sam] mentioned to me, it was most likely much like what it could’ve felt love to do Shakespeare 500 years in the past in an irreverent house, the place you had been on the Globe and folks had been half-listening, they usually had been most likely going to throw apples on the actors in the event that they didn’t assume they had been any good, and somebody went off with a prostitute, after which anyone had a combat. You needed to preserve the eye of the viewers. It was actually fairly arduous. [For us] the liveness of that type of problem was recent and thrilling and humorous.”
“Plenty of theater, and particularly Shakespeare, has this hushed reverence round it,” Crane mentioned. “And it was actually refreshing to discover a house the place none of that existed, and it was simply tough and uncooked and type of humorous and violent.”
Picture: Mubi
Crane and Oosterveen assembled a small firm of misfits to behave of their Hamlet. However like many small theater troupes, additionally they attracted some oddball hangers-on that contributed to the chaotic power of the manufacturing because it advanced from a stage present on the Vinewood Bowl to an immersive theater expertise that may roam throughout the Los Santos map (on the again of a zeppelin, at one level).
One in every of these hangers-on makes a very large impression within the film. GTA participant ParTebMosMir wears a inexperienced alien pores and skin, recites the Quran at his audition, and runs safety for rehearsals in a VTOL jet, gunning down disruptive parts from the skies. “I ought to say, everybody appears to love ParTeb, and he comes throughout very properly within the movie, however I actually wish to make it clear that that man was a nightmare to work with,” Oosterveen mentioned, displaying a little bit of actorly impatience. “To get him to do something, something, took hours and hours and hours.”
“There’s this apocryphal story about [famed German playwright and director] Bertolt Brecht, who in considered one of his productions thought it was all going a bit too easily,” Crane added. “So he discovered this native drunk man and simply introduced him onstage, and he needed to simply cope with it. So I feel perhaps ParTeb has one thing of that high quality, the type of rogue aspect, the little bit of chaos that you just put in simply to shake issues up a bit.”
All through the film, ParTeb and others like him are surreally humorous reminders of the bizarre context the actors put themselves in. One other reminder comes from the presentation of the footage, which is deliberately uncooked and unvarnished, with the sport’s UI parts nonetheless seen. Explaining this choice, Grylls mentioned merely, “It’s a documentary, it’s not a fiction movie.” However GTA On-line’s on-screen alerts additionally present an ironic meta-commentary in the course of the efficiency of Hamlet (“Hamlet_thedane killed King_Claudius”) and a surprisingly poignant sense of what was occurring past the actors’ experiment.
“Somebody who acquired in contact with us mentioned they had been so moved by watching the movie, and the fixed factor developing within the nook — ‘So-and-so has died’ — this virtually ticker-tape factor of dying,” Crane mentioned. “And the way that was so redolent of the pandemic and seeing these information tales of the quantity of people that had been contaminated and had died.”
In individual — or on a video name, anyway — the trio look like typical London theater-and-the-arts sorts. Crane appears to be like like, properly, a middle-aged Harry Potter. Grylls has quick peroxide hair and a Day-Glo Def Leppard sweater. Oosterveen is sporting a Hawaiian shirt on a chilly January night. Their actorliness makes it tempting to suspect that a few of the film’s most dramatic moments, like an in-game row between Crane and Grylls, had been staged. However whereas they admit they rerecorded a number of traces of dialogue to wash up the audio, they deny organising any occasions within the recreation only for their film.
“The argument truly did occur,” Grylls mentioned. “It occurred in actual life the day earlier than as a result of it was my birthday, and he’d missed my birthday, and I mentioned to him, after we went to mattress, ‘You’re an arsehole,’ mainly. After which within the morning I wakened and he was on the fucking recreation. So truly, that was actual. I jumped into the sport and I mentioned, ‘The place are you? It’s 7:30 within the morning, you’re already on this recreation, the one approach I’m going to speak to you is to go within the recreation.’” She mentioned she was fearful about Oosterveen’s obsessive game-playing, too, however he shrugs it off. “I actually had no tasks,” he mentioned. “I used to be full goblin mode.”
For all that Grand Theft Hamlet is a comedy of contrasts, the trio ended up with a sense that video video games and theater have loads in frequent.
“I feel that they’re so related,” Grylls mentioned. “Give it some thought: They’re reside areas the place issues unfold and something might occur. And it’s about pretending to be one thing you’re not.”
Gaming “can usually be a check of empathy,” Oosterveen mentioned. “When you’re taking part in a recreation and the lead character is nothing such as you, it may be very attention-grabbing, as a result of then you’re seeing issues from their perspective. […] I feel lots of people are actors with out realizing it, as a result of they’re taking part in Baldur’s Gate 3, or they’re taking part in Mass Impact, they usually’re mainly making the identical thought processes and selections that an actor makes.”
“That aspect of chaos within the recreation, I feel, is so inherently theatrical,” Crane mentioned. “For me, I wish to try to maintain on to this after I return and do theater usually. To try to hold a component of that absolute chaos and carnage. As a result of that’s actually enjoyable and thrilling.”
Grand Theft Hamlet is in theaters now.