To grief, perchance to meme. It starts, as most good ideas do, with a joke.
By the third UK lockdown, Sam Crane had begun to feel like a ghost. His career had stalled — West End theatres remained dark, television productions sluggish. Even the grand achievement of being cast as Harry Potter in Cursed Child had dimmed, a dream deferred by a pandemic that seemed intent on obliterating every delicate thing in its path. Across the city, Mark Oosterveen, a fellow actor, was also untethered, caught in the isolating limbo of waiting for work that might never return.
“I’d kind of lost my job, and I was quite depressed and worried about the future of live performance,” Sam recalls. “My son — who was 11 at the time — was watching these YouTube videos, particularly Dream SMP, which was this semi-improvised fictional drama inside Minecraft. I had no idea people were role-playing inside video games.” Intrigued, he dove into the world of virtual storytelling and discovered Grand Theft Auto V’s underground community of live role-players. The game’s open world was much more than he had bargained for. “I hadn’t really played the game before, and it just struck me as an extraordinary space — a really creative space.”
Sam reached out to Mark, an experienced GTA player, and the two spent hours aimlessly wandering the city — stealing cars, dodging gunfire, and, in true Shakespearean fashion, soliloquising in the middle of traffic. Then, one day, they stumbled upon something unexpected: a fully functional in-game theatre. The Vinewood Bowl, a sleek, open-air amphitheater nestled in the game’s uncanny replica of Los Angeles, stood there waiting. It was, perhaps, destiny — Hamlet had always been a story of ghosts, existential crises, and reluctant violence. “It just seemed like, yeah, here it is. Here’s a stage. Why don’t we put on a play?” Sam says.
Of course, staging the play inside a digital world designed for mayhem was a logistical nightmare. The first hurdle was casting. They put out a call for actors — anyone with a mic and a PlayStation could audition. A parade of hopefuls turned up, but so did trolls, griefers (players intent on nothing but pulverizing you), and the occasional bazooka-wielding lunatic.
What followed was a production unlike any other. Rehearsals took place in secret, in hidden pockets of the map, where they wouldn’t be gunned down mid-monologue. The ghost scene took place atop a blimp, which crashed mid-performance. Yet, amid the mayhem, something remarkable happened: the play began to feel more lived-in than any polished West End production.
“I think it felt like we were going back to the original spirit of Shakespeare,” Sam says. “At the Globe (Theatre), there was no etiquette, no reverence for it as an art form. It was for the common people. If they didn’t like you, they’d shout, throw rotten fruit. In GTA, people would just shoot you instead.”
His wife, documentary filmmaker Pinny Grylls, saw the absurd brilliance in what they were doing and knew it had to be captured on film. “There was something about that world that spoke to us,” Pinny explains. “It felt like the rotten state of Denmark, which is, of course, where Hamlet is set. A place that’s glamorous on the surface but underneath, there’s a dirty underbelly. There’s lawlessness masquerading as order.”
The game’s environment became an integral part of the performance itself. “We could go on a recce to discover amazing landscapes, lighting, and architecture,” says Pinny. “You can record your feed in 4K and make a film with truly cinematic visuals. GTA gave us imagery to tell our story in a way a traditional stage never could.”
A still from ‘Grand Theft Hamlet’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
For years, videogames (especially the likes of GTA) have oft been dismissed as mindless entertainment, a chance to turn your brain off and let the chaos unfold. But the idea that gaming is merely a guilty pleasure, Sam argues, is a misreading of its potential. “They’re places to have fun and be with your friends, to let off some steam,” he concedes. “But they’re also potentially spaces for fantastic storytelling and artistry. The idea that Shakespeare belongs to ‘high art’ and video games are ‘low art’ — the masses’ playground — is actually wrong. GTA is a highly satirical game. It’s very sophisticated.”
That shift in perception, Sam believes, is already underway. The generation that grew up with videogames now holds positions of cultural influence. “More and more, people recognise how sophisticated and technically proficient games can be. You see it with video game adaptations like The Last of Us, which have been really well regarded. Just because something originates in a game doesn’t mean it can’t be high-level TV or film.”
Even Rockstar Games, the acclaimed studio behind Grand Theft Auto, has kept a watchful eye on Hamlet in GTA. “They were aware of it from a very early stage, actually,” Sam says. “And generally, they were very supportive of what we were doing. But it’s very much an independent film — they didn’t try to take control.” Pinny recalls their reaction with some amusement. “They’re very hands-off, actually, which is kind of nice. And it was nice to hear that they were tickled by what we were doing.”
When they finally staged their full performance — streaming it live to an audience both in-game and online — it was a triumph, if a slightly deranged one. The show, against all odds, went on. The game’s ever-present “WASTED” death screen became a running joke, but also a kind of mantra: failure was inevitable, but so was persistence. Even now, as Grand Theft Hamlet racks up festival wins including SXSW’s Jury Award, a BFI nod, and a Raindance Maverick Award, Sam and Pinny are still half-amazed at what they pulled off.
A still from ‘Grand Theft Hamlet’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
With AI and virtual spaces evolving, does this signal a new era for theatre? “I don’t think exclusively,” Sam says. “There will always be a place for traditional theatre — just people in a space, telling a story to other real people. But virtual performance will become more common, and I think those lines between the real and the digital will get messier and messier.”
For Pinny, the most exciting part is how virtual theatre broadens access. “It used to be that if you were lucky enough to have a theatre in your town, you might go. But a lot of people don’t. Now, theatre can exist on Twitch, on YouTube. The audience is bigger than ever.”
And if Shakespeare can hold court in the digital underbelly of Los Santos, what’s to stop him from brooding beneath the neon glow of Night City? Crane, for one, is already scouting new virtual stages. “I’m playing Cyberpunk 2077 at the moment,” he says. “It’s visually stunning, with incredible storytelling. I think Shakespeare would feel right at home there.”
Grand Theft Hamlet streams on MUBI on Friday, February 21
Published – February 19, 2025 02:53 pm IST
