It’s evening in Los Santos, and on stage, Sam Crane is getting ready to run his lines. On the bill is Hamlet, but getting past the first act might be a struggle.
“It’s nice to have an audience, even if it’s just one,” he says to the solitary member in the crowd. Then another turns up and shoots him.
“If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other,” Crane calls as bullets start flying. One hits him, sending him toppling backwards. “Oh, and don’t kill the actors either.”
This isn’t an issue that Kenneth Branagh has ever faced, but then Kenneth Branagh has never attempted to play the Dane in the gun-toting video game of Grand Theft Auto.
GTA is more associated with senseless murder, grenades and machine guns and car chases that usually end in a red screen and the words ‘Wasted’.
It is less associated with Shakespeare, but that was something Crane and his friends set out to change. And now, his documentary on how he staged the show in GTA is hitting screens in the UK under the excellent title of Grand Theft Hamlet.
So how did it all come about? When the pandemic hit, Crane found himself out of work. A jobbing actor, he’d been preparing to play the role of a lifetime – taking on the lead role in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – instead, as lockdown closed the country and its theatres, he (and many others) were twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do.
He wasn’t even a gamer. “I was one of these people who was kind of only really aware of it through its notoriety,” he said.
That all changed when he saw his kids playing Minecraft. Inspired by the way the online community was using it as a platform to tell stories, he went down a “rabbit hole” that ended with GTA 5, Rockstar’s formative 2015 tale of vice and sin set in a fictional American city.
“The idea that you could do this ongoing fictional narrative inside of a video game kind of blew my mind,” he says. With his friend Mark Oosterveen, Crane stumbled across an open-air theatre, the Vinewood Bowl. Naturally, as out-of-work actors, their first thought was: let’s put on a play.
“After we tried out little bits… I had the idea: why don't we try and do a full production of Hamlet and cast people from inside the game?”
The all-concrete Vinewood Bowl theatre in Los Santos – populated as it is by a crew of gun-toting online players – might sound like an odd place to showcase the Bard’s works, but Crane is adamant that it makes perfect sense.
“This is a space that is so creative and so dramatic,” Crane explains. “When you're in that online space, any moment, anything could happen. Someone can turn up in a plane and drop a bomb on you. You're on the edge of your seat constantly, all the time, and that kind of excitement felt very dramatic.”
The pair quickly got to work realising their vision, along with the documentary’s co-creator (and Crane’s wife) Pinny Grylls, who was in charge of the filming. But hurdles abounded. Random people would wander in and out of the set, or come dressed in outlandish costumes for in-game auditions (one came dressed as an alien). Shoot-outs were common – as were explosions. But Crane was undaunted.
“It's the best kind of live theatre when you're in a play, watching and you feel like you don't you generally don't know what's going to happen,” he says. Well, there’s plenty of that. The trailer itself shows shoot-outs during rehearsals, lines being run while police sirens blare in the background, and audience members wearing skintight luminous leotards.
The pair were also clear from the start: they wanted this to be a documentary of their time in the game.
“We definitely wanted to kind of move away from it being just like a Twitch stream, kind of film,” says Crane. “We wanted to have a balance of something that was a true representation of what it is to be in that game space and play that game, but also become something that is a cinematic documentary.”
What they ended up doing a lot of was using GTA’s in-game smartphone to record the action has it happened, largely thanks to Grylls.
The result is something that seems to appeal to everyone, and makes full use of the game’s impressive graphics. “We've had a really interesting variety of audience members that span real generations actually. Like grandmas coming, who love Hamlet, with their grandson,” says Grylls.
“I think a lot of people may not have played GTA, but pretty much everyone's going to have heard of it and got these preconceptions about it and what it is. And I think what's interesting is that a lot of people can come to this and be quite surprised by the kind of sophistication and beauty of the space and what it can offer.”
And while the pairing of Shakespeare and Grand Theft Auto, seemed unorthodox – mixing the high and the low brows – it actually made perfect sense to them.
“At first glance you think their poles apart. You think they're on opposite ends of a cultural spectrum but actually, I think they go together really well,” Crane says. “There's obviously kind of thematic things that they share. Things about power and pretence and lust.”
“There's also things about Hamlet: it’s all about people pretending to be someone they're not and wearing masks and the play within the play and artifice,” Grylls adds. “And all game spaces are about – you’re in an avatar form, you’re pretending to be something you’re not. I did have a bit of a strange moment where we did the play within the play in the game. I was like, oh my god. There are many too many different layers of reality here.”
And what would Shakespeare himself think of the production? Perhaps he would have recognised the world of GTA.
“Grand Theft Auto is a bit like Shakespeare would have been 500 years ago where it was less reverent and people, if they didn't think you were very good at the Globe they used to throw an apple at you,” Grylls laughs. “They’d probably take some time out to spend time with a prostitute in the middle of it.”
“What could be more GTA than that?” Crane interjects.
“You go and watch a production of Hamlet like the Donmar Warehouse or something and everyone's like quiet. It’s this sort of beautiful, exclusive event that you have to probably get dressed up for and you have to be clever to understand it.
“We wanted to get away from that and get back to strip away all the etiquette and all the reverence around Shakespeare and think, okay, this is just like rough storytelling for anyone and it's funny and it's naughty and it's dirty.”
Grand Theft Hamlet is released in UK & Irish cinemas by Tull Stories from 6 December, then streaming globally on MUBI in early 2025.
