The year is 2021 and England is in it’s third lockdown during the pandemic. Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work theatre actors, spend their days together in GTA Online playing slots, driving around Los Santos and gunning down innocent civilians. But the once fun and sprawling possibilities of the game have now turned into a mindless chore for Sam, whose recent responsibilities as a parent and husband have no patience for his unemployed arse.
That is, until he discovers the Vinewood Bowl, a vacant outdoor arena in the game. Inspired to work with Mark on a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the world of GTA, he puts on a test performance that goes about as well as you’d expect – horribly. But after Sam’s wife, documentary filmmaker Pinny Grylls, learns of her husband’s utterly insane idea, she decides to document the process, buying the game and screen recording her own character to form what we now know as Grand Theft Hamlet.
Similar to the ACMI commissioned piece The Grannies – where several artists tried to reach the out-of-bounds areas of Red Dead Redemption II – Sam, Mark and Pinny create a project that’s marvellously novel. The documentary creates the kind of warm feeling that only a DIY project can. Dialogue is garbled through game chat and out of sync with character’s mouths; auditions are interrupted by sudden gunfire between audience members or the police rocking up from a performed punch. What’s most remarkable, is that both the documentary – as well as Sam and Mark’s version of Hamlet – is done entirely within the vanilla game.
If you’ve spent anytime watching livestreams in the past decade you’ve no doubt heard of GTA Role Play (RP) – even if you’ve never played the game before. It’s essentially taking the immersion of an open world or sandbox like GTA (or Garry’s Mod for all my Source fans out there) and applying the type of serious LARPing you’d see at a renaissance fair or DnD campaign. Players treat the world of Los Santos as the “real”; you go about your day as your character, and if you break the law, the police – usually fellow players or DMs – will arrest you.
Yet, this is done mainly on a modded instance on PC, with people who know what they’re signing up for and all on a privately owned server that can moderate and remove any undesirable griefers and stream-snipers. Sam and Mark not only play on console, but are often found rehearsing in public lobbies or matches where any number of people can show up to spoil the fun. So, the joy of the documentary becomes how exactly they are going to find players willing to cooperate.
Things don’t go well at first, with their first potential actor (Co3lho) speaking little to no english and leaving after Mark’s demo soliloquy. djphil is more promising, being a literary agent who’s always wanted to be in a production of Hamlet , but she soon finds herself unavailable when her nephew, whose account she was borrowing, moves away for work. Nevertheless, thanks to posting about their production on social media, complete with a chaotic in game trailer, they’re able to rally enough friends (Dipo), RP players (Nora) and even famous voice actors (Jen, Pharrah from Overwatch ) to form a troupe for the play. But who really stands out to the audience are the genuine GTA Online players who join the group. Passersby like ParTebMosMir comes to the audition in a gaudy alien outfit ready to mess around, but soon becomes engrossed once he observes the other performers. It’s not really the actual performances that get you, as anyone with a brain can figure out Mark thinks his soccer friend Dipo is right to play Hamlet. Instead, it’s those anonymous players who rally around the troupe that end up receiving the most love.
After a couple months, when the end of the pandemic seems like a possibility, Mark and Sam aren’t exactly surprised to learn that most of their cast can’t balance their “real” work with their life inside Los Santos. Their disappointment reaches an all time high, when Dipo, having been offered a job in a real production, can no longer play Hamlet. Sam begins to question why they’re continuing with the project when it’s eating up so much of their time. And while Mark admits he has nothing to go back to, he can’t help but wonder what this job is exactly:
“We’re stuck doing, this…What is it? Fake job, nonsense job? Whatever this is.” – Mark
While these darker moments are no doubt resonant with many unemployed creatives still struggling after the pandemic (cough, cough), that’s unfortunately where the cracks in the production start to show. Naturally, no documentary is truly candid; no matter how low budget or intentional the director is. But when Mark opens up about his aunt’s funeral and how he has no more living relatives, or Pinny chews out Sam for missing her birthday for GTA, it may feel dramatically powerful, but you can smell the theatricality of it all. It’s at least made better by the intentional cut here and there to NPC’s listening in to all the filmmakers’ dirty laundry over game chat – as it shows Sam, Mark and Pinny are at the very least self aware enough to be a bit tongue-in-cheek.
And all that ceases to matter entirely once the final performance kicks off. With old characters like ParTeb returning to watch, Mark acting as both narrator and tour guide, and all the mishaps that can happen on a blimp, boat or plane, happening – the excitement is palpable.
What little we get of the actual Grand Theft Hamlet speaks to how wonderful games can be for forging lifelong friendships and that even events that seem small in the beginning can create wonderful real world memories for those willing to join in on the fun.