There has been no shortage of cinematic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic on screens both big and small. We’ve had found footage horrors (Host), trippy folk thrillers (In The Earth), prestige TV dramas (Help), quarantine shot (anti-)romances (Malcolm & Marie), existential stand-up/musicals (Bo Burnham’s Inside), and even an allegorical arthouse response to self-isolation from Wes Anderson (Asteroid City). But of all the pieces of art to have emerged from lockdown, we can say with confidence that Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls’ Grand Theft Hamlet — a surreal documentary in which two out of work actors mount a production of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy in the ultraviolent virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online — is easily the funniest. It also, more unexpectedly, may be one of the most cathartic, too.
Comprising footage amassed from over 300 hours of GTA Online gameplay, the first thing that catches the eye when it comes to Crane and Grylls’ film is its bold presentational style. Going one step further than this year’s other maverick game-based doc, Benjamin Ree’s poignant The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin, Grand Theft Hamlet is shot and recorded entirely in-game — mic crackles, agonising respawns, trigger happy trolls, and all. It’s here, in a place one step removed from reality and yet somehow all the more evocative of that world-within-a-world lockdown feeling, that inspiration strikes thespian Crane and fellow actor and pal Mark Oosterveen.
The unorthodox — verging on absurd — set-up spawns a comedy goldmine for the viewer.
Hotfooting it from the feds after a light spot of escapist murder, the duo — Crane a family man whose casting in the titular role of Harry Potter & The Cursed Child was thwarted by Coronavirus; Oosterveen an actor with credits on everything from Eastenders to The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare who lived through lockdown alone — happen upon the empty amphitheatre of Vinewood Bowl, Los Santos. From there, a casual, strangely moving, emote-assisted recital of Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow…” monologue quickly spirals into a hair-brained scheme to mount a fully-fledged, one-of-a-kind production of Hamlet, staged across the wild and unruly world of GTA’s faux California.
It’s the kind of batty idea borne of two artists’ desperation to keep their creative candles burning — and of two middle-aged men alternately cracking up from the cabin fever of being housebound with their family and housebound with no family. (This circumstantial difference between the duo creates a tension at the film’s centre that’s most effective when left unspoken; when it becomes the basis for some second-to-third act bridging drama, the film’s layers of artifice become distractingly blurred.)
The Hamlet of it all comes to represent a Herculean undertaking for Crane, Oosterveen, and Crane’s roped-in director wife Grylls as they set about casting, coordinating, and quite frankly justifying the sheer time commitment necessary to pull off their mad polygonal play. But the unorthodox — verging on absurd — set-up spawns a comedy goldmine for the viewer. Taking in bazooka-wielding alien stage managers, audience-butchering blimps, and only occasionally obviously scripted comedy bits over its tight 90-minute runtime, Grand Theft Hamlet holds a sort of twofold brilliance. On the one hand, it takes one of the finest plays ever written and turns it into a ‘putting the show together’ farce of ZAZian proportions (in a just world, extraterrestrial heavy ParTeb would be a shoo-in for a Supporting Actor nod at the next Oscars.) On the other, it also takes that self-same play and quite brilliantly recontextualises it anew, leaning into the sense of alienation and paranoia felt by Shakespeare’s Danish prince and drawing parallels between that and the experience of living through the uncertainties — the collectivised grief, confusion, trauma — of a global pandemic, all while being kept at arm’s length from our loved ones.
What’s more, lurking beneath the herky-jerky gameplay hijinks, unexpected twists and turns, and spontaneous acts of extreme violence, is an unexpectedly moving, genuinely quite revolutionary tribute to art’s endurance — and importance — in times of crisis. This is, after all, the chronicle of two men’s refusal to let the shuttering of theatre doors mean become the curtain call on their craft and on its capacity to reach across the then-all-too-literal divide to bring people together, to offer some light and escape in a time of darkness and oppressive restriction. As Crane so eloquently puts it while fleeing a convoy of police helicopters and heavily armed lawmen, “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” Quite.
