When I was 16, for a high school English assignment I composed a short play titled Deconstructing Hamlet, made up entirely of decontextualised quotes from Shakespeare’s play, all placed in conflicting dialogue with each other. It probably wasn’t as clever as I thought at the time, but it was early proof to me of the Danish tragedy’s endless adaptability – a virtue that the film industry has amply seized upon over the past century or so. Even with that in mind, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s ingenious documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, in cinemas next month (and on Mubi early next year), stretches the point further than most, examining a lockdown staging of the play within the online digital realm of Grand Theft Auto, emerging as a strangely moving testament to the communal comforts of gaming and performance alike.
Hamlet has been filmed so frequently that it has earned something of a hiatus. The last major “straight” version on screen was Michael Almereyda’s 2000 version (on Apple TV+), with a moody Ethan Hawke as the procrastinating prince out for revenge on his elders. A modern-dress interpretation awash in glossy Y2K styling, it’s now pretty much a period piece capturing what seemed cool at the turn of the century. Hawke is rather good, but it’s undeniably try-hard, while its fashioning of Hamlet as a critique of corporate corruption, with Claudius as the CEO of “Denmark Corp”, had already been better done by Akira Kurosawa in his nasty, spiralling 1960 neo-noir The Bad Sleep Well (BFI Player).
