Tucked away in the hills of Los Santos, a wondrous and lawless land, is the Vinewood Bowl, a gigantic amphitheater that typically sits empty. Modeled after the real-life Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, it is a somewhat hidden space, even for seasoned players of the video game Grand Theft Auto Online.
When Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work London actors, happened upon the site while playing the game during a coronavirus pandemic lockdown in 2021, their thespian curiosity took over.
“I wonder if you could actually stage something here,” Crane’s avatar muses at the start of the documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet.”
So begins a ludicrous journey to making one of the weirdest versions of one of the most performed pieces of literature: a staging of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” entirely within the universe of Grand Theft Auto. In this production, a tortured soliloquy may be interrupted by a rocket launcher fired by a digital avatar wearing a galaxy-print onesie.
This film for me is the juxtaposition of high art and low art, Oosterveen said during a recent group video call.
Part absurdist making-of doc, part postmodern inquiry, “Grand Theft Hamlet” takes place entirely within a game known for its unhinged violence. It tracks Crane and Oosterveen’s struggles to mount their virtual production, including bizarre online auditions with strangers and determining how best to jump from a building onto a blimp.
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