Review: The Bard comes to Los Santos in the hilarious Grand Theft Hamlet

I imagine Shakespeare must be the most-adapted writer of all time. Obviously, his productions are mounted time and time again on the stage, but also on screen. There are plenty of straight adaptations, adaptations that preserve the text but use unique settings, and then those that go far from the source while maintaining the core (something like West Side Story, The Lion King, or Ran). But I have to imagine Grand Theft Hamlet is in the running for the most unique adaptation of the Bard's work. I've certainly never seen anything quite like it.

Filmed entirely within the world of Grand Theft Auto Online, the online component of Rockstar's immensely popular Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Hamlet (man, I'm writing the words "grand theft" a lot) follows two out-of-work actors who, during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, decide to mount a production of Hamlet within the game world.

This, obviously, isn't the way people usually play this game. I've never gotten into GTA myself, but as a gamer, its status and influence are nearly unmatched in modern gaming. Within this online version, players are usually going about the usual business of the game: stealing cars, flying planes, shooting random people, evading the cops. It's a wildly violent world with a lot of freedom, various mini-games and events, lots to do and see. The fictional city of Los Santos is modeled after Los Angeles, so it has beaches, mountains, various neighborhoods. Much to explore. It's a world where you're more likely to trade bullets than words with a random stranger.

And there's a lot of that to be found here. Hell, the idea is birthed when Mark and Sam, both playing as pretty conventionally attractive avatars, happen upon the game's version of the Hollywood Bowl while running from the cops. Immediately after stumbling up onto the stage, Sam wonders if a production has ever been put on there, and the gears start turning. Soon, Sam's wife Pinny (she and Sam are credited as the writers and directors of the film) joins so she can document the project. She wants her character to look like Tilda Swinton; her avatar has a passing resemblance...maybe if Swinton was playing a punk rock sex worker (complimentary).

There's so much joy in gaming. I've been a gamer my whole life. And one of the unique joys of gaming, one that can't really be mirrored in any other form of media, is that you don't have to play by the rules. You can "break" the game, play it in ways it wasn't intended to be played, make your own rules. Maybe you play a single-player game alongside someone else, making it multi-player. Maybe you play Mario Party but try to lose rather than win. When I was a kid, my friend and I made Worms Armageddon into a co-op experience where we prepared for the forthcoming apocalypse, and saw how many rounds of armageddon we could survive. A lot of streamers specialize in this sort of thing, finding new ways to play, putting various rules in place (like a Pokémon Nuzlocke). It can give a game legs, or a whole new life.

And that's precisely what Sam and Mark have done here. They're using this incredible virtual world in a compelling new way, really taking to heart that all the world is a stage. You'd think that trying to figure it all out would be an exercise in compromise, in restrictions, in having to let ideas go. But it feels very much like the opposite. One of their collaborators describes this as a billion dollar adaptation, with unparalleled freedom to bring Hamlet to life in all new ways. Hell, there's a scene that takes place atop a blimp! The opening scene unfolds on a yacht. I don't actually know if any of the final production ended up using the stage that sparked the idea, and where auditions were held. Why stay on the stage when the whole world is there to use?

Watching this creative process unfold is truly hilarious. Figuring out how to spread the word is the first obstacle in many. Running up to a random player and trying to pitch them is a likely recipe for getting "wasted." Indeed, we watch our protagonist die so many times in this movie, which is fitting since it, you know, is taking place in a video game. For the first half hour or so, especially, I was laughing out loud, watching the false starts and stops to get this thing off the ground.

But once the play starts being rehearsed in earnest, the film finds some surprising emotional depths. Some of this is a testament to the power of Shakespeare's writing. When I first started reading Shakespeare as a freshman in high school, I got so obsessed that my English teacher actually asked me to stop reading his plays, to read something else instead. His language remains potent, evocative. It has stood the test of time for a reason. And there's a giddy thrill in watching it come out of the mouths of these virtual characters, hearing it over images that are as far from Shakespeare as imaginable. It reminded me at points of Kubrick's use of asynchronous music in his films, a marriage of high and low, the beautiful and the violent. It's bizarre how much it works.

But the emotion comes even more from the human element. These people are undergoing this project because, at the time, there weren't many options. It was a time of isolation, fear, distress. We were all wondering if the world would ever return to normal. I remember wondering if I'd ever see a play in person again. The world felt like it was shutting down forever, and necessity is the mother of invention. Mark, in particular, bares his soul in a few scenes, talking about the death of his last blood relative, his lack of a family unit to hunker down with, how the play-within-the-game is so important for him because it's basically all he has. Another actor, Nora, talks about how she recently came out as trans to her family, and how that experience is enriching her understanding of Hamlet as a character finding his truth and learning about the people around him. She also says that this will be the first play she's ever seen.

Sam, for his part, finds the various challenges of the play overwhelming, especially when he's tasked with taking over the leading role. But ultimately, he rallies and finds himself overwhelmed by how many people he and his compatriots come across who want to pitch in and lend a hand, sometimes in strange and funny ways (one of my favorite characters, ParTeb, provides security using some sort of stealth bomber-looking airplane). In that way, Grand Theft Hamlet provides a hopeful look at humanity, as people who can rally together to make something unlikely happen.

Watching the film, it almost feels like a bonus when the production actually happens. With our privileged view of the creative process, getting inside the heads of these people and seeing the difficulties they've overcome, it almost doesn't even matter if it turns out okay. But, spoiler alert, it does. What we see is really impressively mounted, and the technical mishaps provide a few last laughs along the way.

I'll always show up for a documentary shot in a video game. While it's still a very small nano-genre, I always find it compelling, and it always provides a unique glimpse at humanity. In this doc, as well as in others like We Met in Virtual Reality and Knit's Island, the lines between the real and virtual worlds blur, sometimes disappear all together. Because the virtual world is real. For some people, it's arguably realer than the real world. If all the world's a stage, maybe all the world's also a game. And we're all merely players.