Grand Theft Hamlet Made Me Contemplate Life, the Universe, and Everything
This GTA Hamlet that you speak of... what is it?
The Venn diagram of people who play Grand Theft Auto and enjoy Shakespeare must be small, a character in the upcoming documentary Grand Theft Hamlet says, in a passing comment. After all, if your guilty pleasure is blowing up people and stealing cars, then would you really want to hear the tale of a turmoiled man tasked with murder? What does Shakespeare have anything to do with America’s most popular video game in the 21th century?
A lot, as it turns out. Both are a rumination on human existence, concerned with the common ailments of mortality and fleeting fixations. Hamlet is thrown into violence, he does not choose it, and so too do the actors of Grand Theft Hamlet have to exist within the bullet-hungry walls of GTA, as the ongoing social isolation of the 2020s forbade live theater. Inverse caught a brief press screening of it, months after it swept up several awards at festivals like SXSW, and the neat 90-minute runtime added a layer of deep contemplation to an otherwise ordinary Wednesday evening.
A still image just before the film began.
Grand Theft Hamlet follows two unemployed, but quite talented, British actors, Sam and Mark, who decide to stage a Shakespearean play — the aforementioned Hamlet — solely inside of the renowned video game GTA, set in a fake version of Los Angeles. They’re aided by Sam’s partner, Pinny, who’s helpfully a documentary filmmaker, and I suspect, the likely linchpin of the whole operation, despite expressing an unfamiliarity with video games. Pinny requests to make her avatar resemble the famed actor Tilda Swinton, and it’s all off to the races from there.
Tragically, the actors have a tough time garnering enough interest in Hamlet at the start. The gamers of GTA seem more interested in sniping off targets or punching NPCs than in sitting around to watch a centuries-old play. Their chosen venue, the Vinewood Bowl, an echo of the Hollywood Bowl, is both gorgeous and embarrassingly near-empty.
But we, the audience, already know Hamlet will turn out okay. We know exactly how the events of Hamlet unfold, and we have a good idea from how many awards Grand Theft Hamlet has racked up that the in-game play likely turns out well too. Given this abundance of outside knowledge even before entering the movie theater, the joy we get from watching Grand Theft Hamlet lies not in any potential surprise plot twists or unpredictable character development. So what’s the point of watching at all, in that case?
Some of the actors in GTA Hamlet.
More than anything, Grand Theft Hamlet seems to be a celebration of the fact that we’re still here on Earth. That somehow, everyday, regardless of how tough it gets, we still choose to be here. Players will, in a landscape strewn with violence and dissent, somehow still make it through an entire production of Shakespeare, and poetically recite soliloquies while ensconced by sunlight on a blimp. They’ll get blown up or knocked off said blimp, but that won’t stop the uniting forces of storytelling magic and personal passion. At the end of the day, both video games and Shakespeare are art, and deserve their recognition.
In the midst of weaving this tale, Grand Theft Hamlet no longer feels merely gimmicky and absurd. There’s a real human element being explored here, albeit one delivered ham-fistedly through the outlandish motions of each avatar. At one show-stopping moment, a random player who claims not to know Shakespeare auditions for Hamlet anyway with a few lines from the Qur'an in Arabic. His words are beautifully subtitled and Mark and Sam take his performance in seriously, giving him the space and appreciation few others were showing them at the time. It’s this sort of kindness that makes the film into a warm and worthwhile experience.
While watching, I couldn’t help but wonder what Grand Theft Hamlet means for the future of video games, storytelling, and cinema. What we have here works, but it’s guided along with the well-known scaffolding of Shakespeare, and the constant narration by Sam and Mark of what’s happening. You can’t yet tell a story entirely in video games and not hold the viewer’s hand at least a little. But if you could? The storytelling potential in GTA is unlimited, as another character says. You could go anywhere from here. And that perhaps is the most exciting thing about Grand Theft Hamlet — the new horizon it’s just peeking over.
