Spoiler warning: this piece explores some powerful moments in Grand Theft Hamlet that you might want to discover for yourself.
Someone clever once referred to The Anatomy of Melancholy as a novel in which all the characters are books. If that’s true, then maybe you could argue that Grand Theft Hamlet is often a movie in which a lot of the characters are famous lines.
Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about an attempt to stage Hamlet inside GTA Online. During the pandemic lockdown, Sam and Mark, two bored and out-of-work theatre people, find themselves playing a lot of GTA Online together. Actually, due to that peculiar cocktail of lockdown experiences, Sam and Mark seem simultaneously bored depressed on edge. In other words, they’re perfectly primed to do something inadvisable.
One morning, running from the cops, they stumble across the Vinewood Bowl – a huge empty stage with nothing happening on it. They quickly decide that they’re going to put on a play – and not just any play. Hamlet seems like the perfect fit for Rockstar’s world. As Sam suggests, Shakespeare’s “fucking brutal”, and by the end of this particular play almost everyone’s dead. Sam’s partner Pinny is a documentary film-maker and quickly comes in to document what happens next. For the rest of the film, we watch as the team gathers actors, rehearses, often under heavy fire from passing players, and eventually tries to stage all five acts of Hamlet.
But those famous lines! Staging Hamlet in GTA means that every so often you get to hear a really lovely familiar bit of Shakespeare ringing out inside Los Santos. “To be…” gets an outing, obvs, but so does “Frighted with false fire,” a favourite bit of Shakey alliteration that has been rolling around in my head for thirty odd years at this point. But then you get a deep cut. “Who would fardels bear?” I hear that soft-play of a sentence and I’m suddenly back doing my A-levels and we’re all laughing about fardels. To think of it! I have not laughed about fardels in decades.