Review: Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024)
Written and directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls

It’s 2021, and London theaters have closed for yet another wave of the COVID pandemic. Two out-of-work actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, are wiling away their days doing nothing but playing online games.

Most of all they spend hours playing Grand Theft Auto, the international streaming hit. In this game, players assume an online name and appearance and walk or drive around an expansive landscape that the game’s success has enabled. The game’s setting resembles Los Angeles and the adjacent southern California desert, but is both seemingly endless and, at the same time, stunningly detailed. To a naive viewer who had never seen the game’s design before — that would be me, a 68-year-old boomer who has never touched a console or streaming video game — it’s very impressive.

Anyway, these out-of-work actors are sitting around playing this game, which involves shooting people, blowing them up. running them over with a car — and I don’t know if the point of the game is simply scoring points each time or what, like I say, I don’t know anything about it — and commiserating with each other about how bored they are and how they wish they could go back to acting.

While playing the game they come across an enormous outdoor amphitheater — in fact, a facsimile of the Hollywood Bowl. They climb onto the stage and one of them tosses off a speech from Shakespeare, like you do if you’re an actor. Then they have a brilliant idea: It’s pandemic lockdown and no one can see each other, or get together and rehearse; there can be no audience. And yet they can see each other inside the game — even if represented as some kind of avatar (which could be any age or shape or sex, could have an alien body for that matter). From there, it’s a short leap to realizing that in this way they could stage theater. And since they’re in Grand Theft Auto, where everyone is killing or being murdered all the time, why not “Hamlet,” in which, famously, pretty much everybody dies?

All this happens while they’re making their way through the game, which means while they’re talking they’re generally shooting or being shot at. Someone else comes along into the amphitheater and shoots them while they’re standing there marveling at the notion of putting on a play.

There’s something very comical about middle-aged two British guys talking about theater while somebody’s taking potshots at them, and there’s also something very funny about getting killed by another player who happens along and randomly shoots you while you’re simply trying to rehearse, dammit! But then, that’s what everyone’s there for, pretty much — until they can manage to interest enough people to take part in their exercise.

To be clear, “Grand Theft Hamlet” the film is a documentary. The viewer never sees the actual production of “Hamlet” from start to finish; this was presented live, within the game, once. This movie is more like “the making of” the production. You see mostly their struggles to put the thing together, to rehearse, and you see snippets of scenes from the play.

It’s all enormously entertaining, and it’s also moving to see the tonic effect on these depressed guys to actually do something creative. The cinematic effects allowed within the game, further manipulated and framed by a director, Pinny Grylls, are unexpectedly beautiful and at times moving.

The film is available on the Mubi streaming service.