Staging a Shakespeare play in Grand Theft Auto

It’s not easy putting on a Shakespeare play. For a start, there are constant shootouts that inevitably kill your main characters. Then your actors might fall off blimps, only to die mid-rehearsal. To top it all off, you constantly have to worry about keeping your audience on your yacht as you ferry them around the production. At least, these are the kind of obstacles that filmmakers Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls faced when they tried to stage such a play, Hamlet, to be precise, in GTA Online.

For those of you who are trying to wrap your head around this idea – it took us a while too – here’s how it all goes down. First, we meet Sam and his friend, Mark, two out-of-work actors languishing in lockdown over the pandemic. Both are unable to find work; Sam recently missed out on the biggest job of his career, playing the lead role in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Playing GTA was Sam and Mark’s way of hanging out and checking in on each other.

In the documentary, we first meet them as we meet everyone in the game: as on-screen avatars, who are actually players speaking to each other through mics. Entirely screen-recorded, the camera follows the pair around as they run through the streets of GTA​’s San Andreas, asking random players (characters who range from tough guys to full-blown green aliens) whether they’d like to be in a remote staging of the bard’s longest play. Sometimes, it’s a no. Often, it’s simply a shot to the head.

Sensing that this tactic might prove difficult in terms of, you know, getting Hamlet off the ground, Sam and Mark put up a call-out for people who might be interested in auditioning – at the game’s Vinewood Bowl, no less, a dramatic stone amphitheater carved into the side of a mountain. Players from all over the world showed up to give a short reading on stage and soon enough, it looks like we’ve got a solid cast together.

It’s around this time that Pinny, an experienced documentary filmmaker and actor Sam’s partner, begins to document their process of directing the project online. Later, Pinny edited hours and hours of rehearsal footage, drive-by shootings and heartfelt conversations between the pair, who spoke candidly about the pandemic’s inherent loneliness and the value of taking part in such a time-consuming project.

“It got to the point where our kids were telling us off for being online so much!” Pinny says, laughing.

The whole thing makes for a hilarious and unexpectedly moving watch, as players drive around in sports cars and rehearse Elizabethan monologues about mortality in luxe, marbled offices with floor-to-ceiling windows. Naturally, we had to know more.

Hi, guys! How did you two meet?

Pinny: We met in 1998. Sam was playing Hamlet, actually, in an Oxford University drama society production of the play. Holly Waddington [the BAFTA-winning costume designer of Poor Things] did the costumes and Sam was dressed like an eighties Edward Scissorhands – very thin with a full face of make-up and black hair. That was the night we got together.

Full circle. Hamlet is notorious for being one of Shakespeare’s heavier plays. Why do you think it works so well on GTA?

P: I think it suits the digital environment of a game because it’s about artifice. It’s about pretending to be something you’re not and mask-wearing. It [carries] this idea of art and representation actually being the way to catch someone’s soul and comment on society. The [online] game space also offered that 500 year old danger of having an apple thrown at you on stage but recreated in a game [referring to the frequent shootings that took place during rehearsals].

Sam: My attitude to both the environment of the game and the world we were living in at the time became very ambiguous. I was worried about so many things whilst also seeing the miraculous beauty of the world. It just seemed to be how Hamlet expresses himself as well. I also think it was a really good play for the pandemic and post pandemic [era]. Suddenly everyone had a lot of time to think very deeply and ask, what is the world like and what are we doing in it? How are we existing?

You weren’t gamers prior to this project. Did you have any preconceptions about GTA before going in?

Yeah, I did. I definitely had that view of, ​“Oh, it’s awful that all these young boys are playing these violent games”. But I realised that when I went into these spaces, it wasn’t just young boys – it’s a real variety of different people and it’s actually a really amazing environment for people with disabilities and neurodivergent people. It’s a place where you can make friendships and have fun which is so important in dark times.

Regarding the violence in the game, well, there’s a pile of bodies at the end of Hamlet and we’re okay with that because it’s ​“art”, so why are we not okay with this game, which is highly satirical and highly sophisticated art about violence? It’s a way of exorcising something that is unpleasant about human nature.

Both Hamlet and GTA come with a lot of cultural baggage. What would you say to those who are going in to see the film for the first time?

We wanted to play with this idea of high and low art. Both have such a notoriety, so to those who haven’t played GTA before, don’t worry about it being something that you think you don’t get. Just go into it and appreciate it for what you see. And exactly the same with Shakespeare fans, I don’t think it’s helpful to think of it as this great piece of art.

I think that it’s also important to think about the fact that Grand Theft Hamlet is not really just a film of the play. It’s a story about this crazy adventure to try and put on this play which seems impossible. It’s a kind of comedy adventure story and it was edited to be really, really entertaining and fun, like the big eighties blockbuster movies Sam and I grew up watching, like Back to the Future.

Some of the most touching moments in the documentary come from your footage of NPCs. Pinny, could you tell us more about that?

P: You can’t control those NPCs, unlike your own avatar, so you need to just go in there and find these characters yourself. I just waited and filmed them almost like a nature photographer and started to record what they were doing. I spent quite a lot of time just following one individual, seeing where they went and what they did — whether it was circular or whether they had interactions with other NPCs, recording what they were saying under their breath.

What’s exciting about filming in Grand Theft Auto is that unexpected things happen and you have to respond and that really feeds the energy of a documentary filmmaker because you don’t like things to be totally controlled.

S: Chaos.

Did you have a target audience in mind for the documentary?

S: There are people who know and love the game who are interested in seeing something different and creative done with it, and I think a lot of people really love that. And then there’s obviously people who are real Shakespeare buffs and they like seeing interesting interpretations of Shakespeare.

But I think for both of those groups there’s something new. So for Shakespeare fans, it might open their eyes to what gaming can be. And similarly, on the other side, people who didn’t really know Shakespeare before could think, oh, wow, that’s much more interesting and funny than I imagined it to be.

During filming [people did say] no one wants to see anything about the pandemic. Don’t make a film about it. But I think our film shows something positive that did come out of it [as well as] acknowledging it as a really tough moment that we all went through.

P: The world has had to go through a lot of pain recently and is going to go through more. And it’s really important to keep making films that do celebrate that togetherness of creating something because it’s actually all we’ve got.

What have you taken away from the whole process?

P: I’ve just been really amazed at how the film has taken off because it was a little film. We had tiny amounts of funding initially for it and we made it in our bedroom. So I’ve learned that if you think you’ve got some interesting idea, don’t think, oh, because I haven’t got a massive Hollywood studio behind me, [I can’t do it]. It doesn’t matter because that’s how new things are created. It’s by people in their bedrooms.

S: Just keep going. That’s what I kind of learned from playing video games because you get blown up, you get killed but you can respawn and you keep going. Just keep getting up and enduring. Respawn, respawn, respawn.

Grand Theft Hamlet is released in UK & Irish cinemas by Tull Stories from 6 December, then streaming globally on MUBI in early 2025