A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting. This could be a Marat/Sade for the 21st century. During the lockdown, two out-of-work actors called Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were (remotely from each other) playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA) online – and this entire film is shown as in-game GTA action. As their avatars were avoiding getting shot, mutilated or beaten up in the normal GTA way, running through the vast and intricately detailed urban landscape of Los Santos, the quasi-LA in which the action happens, they chanced upon the deserted Vinewood Bowl amphitheater. They wondered if it might be possible to stage an in-game production of Hamlet there, recruiting other gamers to play the parts, in their various bizarre outfits and handles and personae, moving around the virtual reality space in that weightless, almost-real way, speaking the lines into their mics while the avatars’ lips move in approximate sync.
They audition all-comers: an uproarious business in which weird randoms show up with a tendency to destroy others by using a flame-thrower or rocket-launcher for no reason at all while the production is being explained to them. But they also encounter people who have fascinating or poignant stories to tell. At the end, we see the finished performance – though the atmospheric musical soundtrack was presumably added later, for the film.
As it happens, they don’t stick to the stage of the Vinewood Bowl but range boldly all over the city; as one of the lead players says, this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget, or Shakespeare as Elon Musk could afford to produce it. Crane and Oosterveen, with Pinny Grylls (who directs along with Crane), reflect absorbingly on the endless, bleak violence of the game, how close it is to the violence of Shakespeare’s world and how depressed they are due to the stasis of lockdown; it adds up to a new dreamlike insight into Hamlet’s melancholy.
The result is wild, like Baz Luhrmann’s gangbanger Romeo + Juliet or Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which actors roam the land performing their show but suspect that no one is out there watching it. It is really funny and tender when Crane, Oosterveen and Grylls start arguing among themselves in a freaky GTA setting. (For these “real” crises, they might have been putting it on a little bit – but no matter.)
For me, Oosterveen’s bewildered voice sounds very much like Simon Jones as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say Douglas Adams would have loved this film. I certainly did.
• Grand Theft Hamlet is in UK and Irish cinemas from 6 December.
