A few years back, I had a very strange dream. I dreamed that I was the producer and director of an animated film. The film was of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as enacted by Donald Duck and other denizens of the Disney universe. Donald, of course, played the melancholy Dane; Daisy was Ophelia; Uncle Scrooge McDuck played Polonius; and Mickey Mouse was Laertes. You see how it goes. It was a zany idea, some would say idiotic, and yet it possessed me for months on end. Not to the extent that I couldn’t get other work done, but certainly to the extent that some people close to be became convinced that a visit to a “rest home” might be in order. Eventually I got over it, but even as I type these words, a part of me mourns the death of a beautiful dream.
So, you can see why, when I heard of the existence of a motion picture called “Grand Theft Hamlet,” why I might jump at the chance to check it out. The movie, directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, is exactly what the title implies: a chronicle of an attempt to stage Shakespeare’s play in the virtual space afforded by the famed video game “Grand Theft Auto.” If you’re not a gamer and don’t keep up with certain realms of digital development, you’re probably not familiar with the reality that you can enter a contemporary video game and spend an awful lot of time not actually playing it. So, this movie asks, why not get into theater if you’re not in the mood to steal cars and drive them very fast?
This idea did not hatch in a vacuum. Out-of-work actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen conceived the project during the COVID lockdown, in large part to prevent going stir-crazy, or any other type of crazy. (But then again, non-gamers may conclude that these guys were already crazy in some way.) And they took it seriously from the outset. They scouted locations within the “GTA” world. (It does in fact contain an amphitheater.) They held auditions. (The game can be played with almost limitless players online.) They convinced the gaming community that they were not, as the British say, taking the piss.
They indeed seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time on this last activity. So much so that the fellows are often close to heartbreak. This adds a perhaps unexpected poignancy to the story. And it also makes their Hamlet noteworthy in a way that perhaps they didn’t even expect. When Crane finally speaks the “to be or not to be” soliloquy he doesn’t sound like he’s acting. At all. How he came to inhabit the role sure is unusual, but inhabit it he does, and you may feel like giving him a standing ovation after all. More than just a shaggy dog story, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is a pointed, entertaining and moving examination of interdisciplinary conductivity at its most surprising.