Starring Sam Crane, Mark Oosterveen.

Written & Directed by Pinny Grylls & Sam Crane

Tull Stories – in cinemas now

Two struggling actors find solace from lockdown isolation by attempting to stage Hamlet entirely within the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online

Full disclosure: I’m not a gamer. Yes, I’m well into my seventh decade, but I have no snobbery about it. Before my kids left home I’d play a fair bit. Metal Gear Solid was my favourite. That’ll be Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which I realise to my horror was released in 2002, a whole lifetime ago. And if memory serves me correctly, the last version of Grand Theft Auto I careered around was Vice City in the same year. The only reason I laid down my Dual Shock Controller was that it was all too addictive and I knew that if I kept on playing I would never stop. Gaming was eating my life.

To be fair, while I can enthuse about a good deal of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, Hamlet has always bored me rigid, and having sat through several notable (and very long) productions, I have also resented the Bard for eating my life as well.

I was worried, therefore, that I might struggle to engage with Grand Theft Hamlet which – in creating a mind-bending genre of one ­– is fundamentally reliant on both life-devouring elements.

Mark and Sam (playing themselves, albeit in hunky avatar form) are two actors stuck at home and unable to work during the pandemic. Mark, particularly, is struggling. He’s on his own and the isolation is getting to him. Imprisoned by lockdown, their best hope for social interaction is online, even if that takes the form of stealing cars, running people down, filling them full of lead or simply beating the crap out of them.

One day, they chance upon the Vinewood Bowl amphitheater and it occurs to them that no one has ever staged a play entirely within an online environment, and what better material to start with than the greatest play of all time. Sam’s film-maker partner Pinny gets involved and they decide to record the whole thing from inside the game to create a ‘documentary’ of their virtual adventure. The resulting movie has more layers than a record breaking comedy lasagne.

What follows is 90 minutes of gripping, brilliantly funny, totally original and mind-bogglingly profound cinematic… something or other. Is Grand Theft Hamlet strictly speaking a documentary? Clearly some sections are scripted, or at least reconstructed for dramatic purposes, but that doesn’t rankle as it might in a live-action movie that’s feigning verité, because the whole film is in an artificial reality to start with. Indeed, at the heart of Grand Theft Hamlet are fundamental questions about what it means to be a living human being (as opposed to a virtual one), surprisingly similar to the questions that are being asked by Shakespeare’s miserable Dane. I was left in no doubt that had Bill been writing today he, too would have been asking whether a virtual life is any more pointless than a living, breathing one. Other parallels are hugely enjoyable too, not least that both Hamlet and GTA conclude with piles of corpses.

All of this has the potential to be an exercise in turgid self-indulgence, but the sheer chutzpah of trying to stage a five-act Shakespearean Tragedy in a Beat-Em-Up video game makes for uproarious entertainment. After all, any theatre production requires an audition process, but usually that’s in a quiet North London rehearsal room, not in a dystopian LA where ‘griefers’ are going to leap out at any moment and waste the director with a pump action shot gun.

Whether or not Mark and Sam succeed in their theatrical quest (without getting blown away by a random RPG, or distracted by semi-naked aliens) is for you to find out when you hunt down a big screen to see this terrific film. And it genuinely is worth finding it in a theatre before it hits streaming. The world of GTA is especially breathtaking when blown up to the size of a house.

Verdict: Grand Theft Hamlet is something very special indeed and you don’t need to be a gamer or a Shakespeare buff to know you’re unlikely to see anything like this ever again. File under ‘Unique and Brilliant’. 10/10

Martin Jameson

http://www.ninjamarmoset.com