Thoughts on … Grand Theft Hamlet

Let us be honest, if you were not a keyworker being forced out of your home to do your job, we all developed weird hobbies during Covid lockdown. I can remember spending one evening watching someone do a fundraising stream where they were reading out what is widely acknowledged to be the worst fanfic in the universe. But putting on a production of Hamlet inside Grand Theft Auto? That is pretty out there^*.

Grand Theft Hamlet is the documentary about that attempt, which I saw last week at the cinema, and I wanted to write more than one-line about it, so here we are.

The documentary has been getting some great reviews from traditional film critics, but I did, in retrospect, wonder how many of them have been exposed to hours and hours of YouTube gameplay videos like I have due to having kids the right age for it? Certainly, showing a documentary that entirely exists of captured gameplay might be radical if you’ve never seen such a thing before, but gameplay footage with a narrative is the staple of Minecraft series like
HermitCraft (which is now on season 10).

So thanks to that, I wondered if I was having a very different cinema experience to everybody else watching it. Certainly there were bits where I was howling with laughter where other people in the screening … were just not. There’s just something inherently funny about people in the middle of rehearsing Shakespeare suddenly having to shout “Shit! It’s the cops” and having to run from Swat teams descending from helicopters because there’s been a gunfight nearby and being terrible at controlling vehicles or failing a jump at a critical moment.

I definitely enjoyed it, but I’m not sure the play-within-a-play-within-a-game aspect of it was ultimately as profound as it seemed to think? And because it only contained contemporary in-game footage of trying to put the event on, it maybe lacked any insight into how it had affected the people involved post-pandemic, and there was no kind of retrospective reflection beyond “this happened.”

It did though make me re-download Grand Theft Auto V to my PlayStation and start having another crack at the single-player mode within it.

That has in turn made my kids laugh as I was forced to reveal that having downloaded it on the day it came out for the PS4 in November 2014, I had last played it in December 2016, and during those two years had completed a whopping 3.7% of the story. For shame.

Now, staging Hamlet inside Horace Goes Skiing, that is a project I could get behind.

^*As weird as making live broadcasts of Fortean electronica? Who can say. I haven’t turned that into a documentary though. Yet.