The Player’s the Thing in “Grand Theft Hamlet”
In an 1818 lecture, on the subject of “Hamlet,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:
Coleridge was talking in particular about the eccentric babblings of the prince after he meets the ghost of his father—“wild and whirling words,” in the view of Horatio. Far from being unlikely, this wild whirl is, as Coleridge points out with his typically practical shrewdness, “a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium.” No less than we should expect, in short, of someone who has just been incomprehensibly freaked out.
If you fancy a fresh dose of grotesquerie, and more technical phraseology than you can shake a joystick at, I recommend “Grand Theft Hamlet.” This is a newly released movie, notionally a documentary, yet it’s only just a movie. Think of it more as a crucible in which the solid forms of film, theatre, and video games have been stirred until they melt. It has its origins, like many of the weird cultural misshapings to which we have become habituated, in the years of COVID-19.
The action starts with inaction. At the beginning of 2021, two British friends, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, are stuck. Both of them are actors, with no work; the U.K. is in lockdown, and London theatres have been shut, as they sometimes were by plague in Shakespeare’s day. Mark is contending with loneliness. Sam is married, with a family. The two guys meet up in the only space where they can wander freely—that is, online. Like millions of other aimless souls, with itchy thumbs and time weighing heavy on their hands, they find themselves playing Grand Theft Auto. Within the game, in the fictional city of Los Santos, they happen upon an amphitheatre, and a thought, largely though not entirely comic, occurs to them. Why not stage “Hamlet” inside the world of G.T.A.?
The movie is co-directed by Sam Crane and his wife, Pinny Grylls, and it depicts the efforts of Sam and Mark to cast, rehearse, and perform a production of the play. Not once, aside from the end credits, are we granted a glimpse of life beyond the limits of the game, although we hear a lot of chatter from incoming people. When I saw “Grand Theft Hamlet,” in a movie theatre, every exchange was subtitled; Grylls, a documentarian by trade, is also, in her own words, “a proud member of the deaf community,” and the experience of seeing the subtitles switch without warning from everyday speech, rich in rudeness, to timeworn passages of Shakespeare creates a very appealing sense of verbal collage. You need to hark back to Grigori Kozintsev’s great 1963 film of “Hamlet,” in which Shakespeare’s words were consigned to the subtitles while the characters orated in Russian (a translation of the play by Boris Pasternak), to feel so bracing a shock of disorientation.
The climax of the movie is a performance of “Hamlet” that took place on Grand Theft Auto Online on July 4, 2022. All we get of it, unsurprisingly, are a few choice morsels, lasting fewer than fifteen minutes; in reality, the show went on for four hours or so. (That is, indeed, the rough length of an uncut “Hamlet.” Think of the bladder-testing Kenneth Branagh version that was released in cinemas in 1996.) The rest of the film is occupied with auditions, ruminations, sudden demises, and a ridiculous number of helicopters, which the good folk of G.T.A. seem to use as blithely as you or I would hail a cab. The finest such moment comes when one participant, Dipo, whom Sam and Mark have tagged for the role of the prince, lands in a chopper, and proclaims a scrap of Act II, Scene 2: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—” Then, instead of adding the next phrase, “lost all my mirth,” he turns and lobs a grenade into the helicopter, which explodes. Everybody watching bursts into destruction-loving cackles. Mirth regained.
Dipo plays under the nom de jeu of Dollah101, and he’s one of a slew of figures who, either from curiosity or because they feel sunk in a Hamlet-like stagnation, roll up in response to an open casting call put out by Sam and Mark. We have the pleasure of meeting ParTebMosMir, a lime-green alien, unmistakably proud of his derrière, who, in lieu of reciting Shakespeare, takes Sam and Mark aback with a heartfelt declamation from the Quran. Other hopefuls entertain us with excerpts from “Julius Caesar” and “Othello.” There is also the estimable DJPhil—bare chest, top hat, camouflage-patterned shorts, and shades. She, not he, introduces herself (“I’m a literary agent, and a mum, and I love “Hamlet”), explains that she is temporarily assuming her nephew’s avatar, and, by way of proving her credentials, launches into the prince’s self-exculpation from Act V, Scene 2, before the duel: “If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, / And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.”
It’s a knotty and unusual audition piece, not one of the play’s most palpable hits, and, whether by coincidence or design, a perfect fit for the matter in hand. Being taken away from yourself, after all, is pretty much the raison d’être of G.T.A. and other fervid pastimes of that ilk. The actress both is and is not DJPhil, and she crowns the ambiguity by skipping ahead a few lines to the command that Hamlet issues to Osric: “Give us the foils. Come on.” Thereupon she draws a stubby shotgun, slays Laertes—currently incarnated by Sam—in cold virtual blood, and almost dies laughing. You can’t blame her.
To an extent, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is picking up where Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) left off. The sight of DJPhil whipping out a shotgun, rather than a foil, reminded me instantly of the gonzo scene at a gas station in Luhrmann’s film, when the anachronism of Benvolio’s line “Put up your swords” is swept aside by a closeup of the maker’s mark on a handgun—“Sword 9mm Series S.” But Crane and Grylls, I suspect, are onto something more than the buzz of a smart historical update. Consider the moral environment of G.T.A., where cruelty is funny and where malignity, more often than not, springs from the daftest and the most fleeting of motives and leaves no lasting trace. Might that actually be near as we’re likely to get to the mood of the mob, in theatres and other pits of revelry, in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England? We may be baffled by a public that rejoiced in the baiting of bears. But what would Shakespeare’s contemporaries make of us as we sit in front of a little window, in the warmth of our own homes, and watch puppetlike people blast one another in the head?
Whether Sam and Mark picked the right play, on the other hand, I’m not sure. In a way, it’s the obvious choice; if you’ve ever heard of Shakespeare, you’ve heard of “Hamlet.” And there’s certainly a reviving kick in seeing “To be or not to be” tried out against different backdrops: first on a high rock beside a heaving sea (not unlike the lofty cliff from which Olivier delivered the soliloquy in his Oscar-winning film of 1948), and then, at the finale, beside a firepit on the rooftop of a casino. Thus is the anguished prince rebooted as a spoiled dude, hopping lightly through the flames for something to do. If I had to pick the most accurate guide to G.T.A., however, I would plump for the retrospective words of Horatio, who, surrounded by corpses as the play winds down, tells Fortinbras and the English ambassadors exactly what they’ve missed. The speech is not included in “Grand Theft Hamlet,” and that’s a pity, because it sounds just like a trailer for the game:
An Elizabethan audience, at the start of the seventeenth century, would instinctively have taken Horatio’s words as a kind of confirmation, reassuring them that what they had just witnessed was a revenge tragedy. “Hamlet” represents both the peak of that genre and also a deepening, hitherto unimaginable, of its possibilities. It’s no slur on “Grand Theft Hamlet” to say that such depths lie beyond its scope. What it most resembles, to my eyes and ears, are the revenge tragedies that preceded and succeeded “Hamlet”—the treacherous slopes that led up to and away from it. Take Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” which was staged sixteen times at the Rose Theatre in 1592 and 1593, and which also features a ghost, a bout of madness, and a play within the play. Or the fantastical intensity of “The White Devil,” John Webster’s plunge into illicit passions and evil intent, which was initially performed (without much success) at the Red Bull, in London, in the dark winter of 1612. Listen to Flamineo, one of the many villains, seemingly egging on the heroine, Vittoria, and her maid, Zanche, to snuff him out:
