When Shakespeare and Gaming Collide

‘Grand Theft Hamlet’

SXSW

Documentary Grand Theft Hamlet could have been born out of the ennui bred by COVID lockdown in 2021, however it’s something however boring.

Revolutionary, extremely amusing and infrequently touching, this collaborative mission, competing within the documentary characteristic strand at SXSW, takes place solely throughout the open sport world of Grant Theft Auto On-line. On this sprawling digital house, briefly out-of-work U.Ok.-based actors Sam Crane (who has performed Harry Potter within the London manufacturing of Harry Potter and the Cursed Little one) and his pal Mark Oosterveen determine to mount a manufacturing of Hamlet, a primary for each the theater and gaming worlds.

Fortunately, Crane’s companion Pinny Grylls can be a filmmaker. She takes on the directing and modifying, utilizing the cellphone cameras avatars can use within the sport to movie from different angles and supply close-ups. The couple juggle caring for his or her babies with placing on the present and documenting the entire effort, whereas assistant director Oosterveen and an ensemble {of professional} and aspiring actors fill out the solid of Hamlet. Safety — an absolute necessity given how usually strangers method bearing weapons, intent on killing different gamers, which is the truth is the entire level of the sport — and digital stage administration are supplied by a motley crew of random avid gamers, in it for the love and/or LOLs. Many are identified solely by their eccentrically spelled person names or “gamer tags” and colourful avatars, like green-skinned, Creature-from-the-Black-Lagoon-lookalike ParTebMosMir, a Tunisian-Finnish gamer who auditions by reciting the Koran at one level and stays till the ultimate efficiency and solid celebration.

Pleasant as the ultimate product is, it’s not possible to not surprise how a lot we see on display screen occurred spontaneously and the way a lot was recreated or solely staged, regardless of the documentary label. In spite of everything, the ultimate credit invoice the movie as “written and directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane.” The writing, one suspects, is there from the beginning within the opening scene, which finds Sam (aka Rustic Mascara, within the sport a beefy, bearded man with blue hair and an undercut) and Mark (aka Ooosters, visualized as a normcore white dude) pootling across the SoCal-esqe panorama of Los Santos in presumably stolen golf carts. It appears unlikely that the 2 associates simply occurred to be recording themselves enjoying and chatting utilizing the sport’s VoIP characteristic when — hey! — they occur upon the Vinewood open-air amphitheater the place, being actors, they’ll’t resist declaiming a monologue from Macbeth earlier than the sport’s NPC police present as much as arrest them.

Nonetheless, the intrusions from passing gamers, usually intent on killing Sam or Mark or one another, and non-player characters (NPCs) appear actual sufficient — and heaven is aware of dramatic recreations are rampant nowadays in documentaries, there to fill out the bits the digicam may by no means have captured. It doesn’t actually matter right here; we’re not coping with a real crime, simply game-play-level larcenies, assaults and murders, plus a couple of unintentional deaths.  

Sam, Mark and Pinny work by means of the method of placing on a present all the way in which, from auditioning potential actors to picking areas for the efficiency to the final word opening evening. Like all backstage drama or comedy, there are ups and downs, from the excessive of casting Dipo Ola to play Hamlet to the low of shedding their main man when Dipo finds he hasn’t acquired time to decide to the present having secured an appearing job within the so-called actual world. Makes an attempt to make use of a blimp and numerous planes to maneuver the solid round Los Santos show problematic, and there’s at all times the chance of getting shot in the midst of a monologue, regardless of how politely they ask the passerby to depart them in peace. Naturally, all of it comes collectively, roughly, for opening evening, which it appears was additionally closing evening as nicely.

Alongside the way in which, there are a couple of scenes that additionally really feel written or semi-improvised in an effort to add a bit drama or pathos. For example, when Sam and Pinny focus on their frustration with the mission and the way all-consuming it’s grow to be, making them really feel responsible for not spending extra time with their children and one another. They log out to allow them to discover one another of their home in Hackney, London, in an effort to give each other a real-world hug. Mark, then again, doesn’t have any hugging choices, being a bachelor who at one level takes a break from the play to attend the funeral of his final residing relative in Amsterdam.

It’s at these moments that the movie will get throughout the bizarre weight of lockdown, a time of rigidity and nervousness but additionally a possibility for artistic development none of us noticed coming. The movie brings these themes gently to the fore with a beautiful lightness of contact, whereas elsewhere the filmmakers show an actual eye for each the wonder and the bloodshed of Los Santos’ sport world. Within the sequence the place Hamlet soliloquizes on “what a chunk of labor is man” for instance, the “digicam” zooms in on the ravaged face of a drunk or drugged NPC, squinting within the seaside daylight — a broken piece of labor certainly but additionally, in his personal approach, like an angel besides made up of code and pixels.

I occurred to observe the movie with my 15-year-old gamer child, and he was thrilled with the film, laughing delightedly all through and remarking on how candy it was. He was additionally, fairly rightly, excited to see a movie illustrating the artistic, optimistic aspect of gaming as a substitute of providing one other illustrated diatribe, bemoaning how gaming is corrupting everybody’s thoughts and turning younger individuals into murderous psychopaths.

Nicely, perhaps some gamers get their heads turned that approach, however Grand Theft Hamlet additionally underscores how a lot gaming, like appearing on a stage or in movies, is performative, cathartic, playful in each sense — and the way Shakespeare performs, now thought of so intellectual, are stuffed with violence and retribution, identical to GTA. All of the world’s a stage, and all that jazz.