A play within a game: Grand Theft Hamlet brings Shakespeare to life

Strutting across the stage at the Vinewood Bowl amphitheatre, a fictional location in the gamescape of Grand Theft Auto Online (GTA), out-of-work actor Mark Oosterveen, through his GTA avatar, delivers Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ soliloquy. It’s an apt speech for the moment, as Oosterveen struts across the pixelated stage, a literal ‘player’ in this gameworld that functions as a shadow of reality. Moments later, gunfire rings out, police helicopters arrive. Both Mark and his friend and fellow actor Sam Crane’s avatars are killed in the crossfire. GTA is certainly full of sound and fury.

‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day’. Macbeth’s contemplation of the relentless passage of time is also apt for many of our experiences of the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. It is that world that Oosterveen and Crane are fleeing as they remotely played GTA together and bemoaning the loss of theatre (and their work) during the pandemic. Yet Mark’s speech on the Vinewood Bowl stage sparks an idea. Could a Shakespeare play be performed within GTA?

This is the premise of Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary filmed entirely within Grand Theft Auto Online. The documentary is a piece of machinima: machine-cinema or films created within video games. The term covers everything from an Emmy-award winning South Park episode with several scenes set in World of Warcraft to the music video for Lil Nas X’s breakout hit, ‘Old Town Road’ set in Red Dead Redemption 2. Grand Theft Hamlet follows Crane, Oosterveen, and Penny Grylls (co-director and Crane’s partner) as they attempt to cast, direct, and stage a performance of Hamlet across the violent yet dreamlike virtual world of Los Santos, a Los Angeles-like city of vice, wealth, and violence.

There would be obstacles of course — teenagers trying to kill you, the stock groans and grunts and solicitations from GTA’s cast of NPCs (non-playable characters), and locating anyone in the seemingly small crossover of GTA players and budding Shakespeareans. All of this taking place while Crane, Oosterveen, Grylls, and their actors grapple with the isolation, melancholy, and strained relationships that the pandemic inflicted, makes Hamlet an especially fitting play.

While many of the players were real-world actors, Grand Theft Hamlet is also populated with a more diverse, less obvious cast of gamers. ParTeb, a Finish-Tunisian gamer, doesn’t perform in the play, but offers to act as bodyguard for the production – and in one of the most poignant moments in the film, delivers an Arabic passage from the Quran in place of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

I watched a lot of Shakespeare during the pandemic, despite the impossibility of sitting in a physical theatre. I took part in interactive ‘watch-alongs’ of filmed productions and saw friends in live Zoom productions, where household objects became props. Pascale Aebischer tracks many of these virtual productions in her 2024 book, Viral Shakespeare, reflecting on the centrality of Shakespeare in so many of our attempts to connect or disconnect.

Aebischer goes on to note how popular Hamlet was in these online performances and reflected on how it spoke to the moment as a play, in many ways, taking place in a locked down Elsinore, where ‘Hamlet emerges as the archetypal hero whose desire for action and resistance is frustrated by the fundamental rot that has taken hold of his environment.’ Certainly in Grand Theft Hamlet, the sullen prince is an easy role to slip into for the similarly isolated and frustrated Oosterveen.

While the efforts to maintain, recreate, and reimagine theatre in a locked down world were admirable, many of us felt fatigued, distracted, and uninspired by these attempts, especially through the wintery second lockdown. While virtual theatre offered accessibility, fewer budget constraints and a global audience, the theatrical experience couldn’t be replicated online. Gaming, however, offered some fresher approaches to the genre. In 2020 and 2021, the games studio Tender Claws ran a live, immersive, and interactive performance of The Tempest within the virtual reality game, The Under Presents. The Wasteland Theatre Company performs Shakespeare in the online, open world of Fallout 76, where players may stumble across a performance of Romeo and Juliet in the game’s retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic desolation.

Gaming, and often the combination of literature and gaming, offered solace and connection for me in 2020 too – over video calls, I ran Shakespeare-inspired tabletop roleplaying games (think Hamlet meets Dungeons and Dragons). Rather than the pixelated dreamscape of GTA’s Los Santos, we used the theatre of the mind to transport to Hamlet’s Elsinore, Puck’s Forest of Arden, and Viola’s Ithaca. Easter eggs for Shakespeare fans could be dropped throughout these gamified worlds, but regular tabletop gamers could transform into Laertes, Helena, or Toby Belch for an evening too.

The final production of Hamlet in GTA’s Los Santos is, as its directors joke, on a budget most thespians could only dream of. Scenes are performed in a sky-scraping bachelor pad, beside an abandoned, bullet-strewn limousine, and even in the clouds atop a blimp. Such moments speak to the extremity of this virtual world, as ‘rotten’ as Hamlet’s Denmark, yet Grand Theft Hamlet is full of humour, tenderness, and at times a dreamlike quality. I’ve received plenty of smirks or looks of confusion when trying to explain Grand Theft Hamlet to friends and colleagues – yet as the accolades and 5* reviews pour in, might we expect more Shakespeare and gaming mashups in the mainstream?