Tucked away within the hills of Los Santos, a wondrous and lawless land, is the Vinewood Bowl, a huge amphitheater that usually sits empty. Modeled after the real-life Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, it’s a considerably hidden area, even for seasoned gamers of the online game Grand Theft Auto On-line.
When Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two out-of-work London actors, occurred upon the positioning whereas taking part in the sport throughout a coronavirus pandemic lockdown in 2021, their thespian curiosity took over.
“I’m wondering should you might really stage one thing right here,” Crane’s avatar muses at first of the documentary “Grand Theft Hamlet.”
So begins a daft journey to creating one of many weirdest variations of one of the vital carried out items of literature: a staging of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” completely throughout the universe of Grand Theft Auto. On this manufacturing, a tortured soliloquy could also be interrupted by a rocket launcher fired by a digital avatar sporting a galaxy-print onesie.
“This movie for me is the juxtaposition of excessive artwork and low artwork,” Oosterveen mentioned throughout a latest group video name.
Half absurdist making-of doc, half postmodern inquiry, “Grand Theft Hamlet” takes place completely inside a recreation recognized for its unhinged violence. It tracks Crane and Oosterveen’s struggles to mount their digital manufacturing, together with weird on-line auditions with strangers and figuring out how finest to leap from a constructing onto a blimp. The surreal type involves enliven Shakespeare, whereas additionally revealing the inside conflicts of its gamers amid the grim instances of isolation.
“It’s like a bromance, really,” mentioned Pinny Grylls, a documentary filmmaker who directed the movie with Crane.
“About two loser actors,” Crane added with fun (he’s married to Grylls).
Crane had been solid because the lead within the West Finish manufacturing of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Little one” earlier than the pandemic paused issues indefinitely. Throughout lockdown, he was struck by how the YouTube gaming movies his son was watching resembled a type of theater.
“There’s this sort of dwell efficiency aspect to it, watching individuals play video games on-line,” Crane mentioned.
Bored and with out a lot gaming expertise, he reached out to Oosterveen, a seasoned gamer and fellow actor he had labored with earlier than, to discover the imprecise concept of creating an artwork piece. They started experimenting, recording hours of their gameplay inside Grand Theft Auto On-line, a multiplayer extension of Grand Theft Auto V.
They spent a few days choreographing an intensive interpretive dance routine. They did a livestream commentary of a soccer recreation on a on line casino rooftop. After a YouTube video of their adventures gained some traction on-line, they determined to significantly run with their concept of staging “Hamlet,” a play wherein — mirroring their setting — everybody dies.
Ultimately, Crane introduced Grylls into the sport to doc their journey. Utilizing solely in-game instruments, Grylls lent the movie each an natural view of gameplay and a cinematic, typically contemplative eye.
“I spent a very long time actually wandering round alone and simply being contained in the area, trying on the mild and the way it modified, all of the totally different landscapes and in addition the nonplayable characters,” Grylls mentioned. These NPCs, the computerized inventory characters who populate the sport, “turned nearly like silent witnesses to what was occurring.”
A scene that includes Crane’s recitation of the “to be or to not be” soliloquy overlays in-game scenes of quiet desperation: anonymous figures cowering in a bar, wearily taking a smoke break, begging for cash.
The uncanny type offers an eerily apt view of Shakespearean tragedy and an more and more disorienting post-Covid existence. “You need it to replicate the world, however not fully,” mentioned Oosterveen, who additionally served as an affiliate director. “One thing must be awry.”
The movie follows Crane and Oosterveen’s obsessive reclusion into the sport amid lockdown, reflecting the unusual actuality of the digital area. In a single uncooked second, Grylls enters the sport to confront her husband after he skipped her birthday celebration due to on-line rehearsals for the manufacturing.
But the movie additionally challenges perceptions of on-line gaming as poisonous and isolating. The actors discover neighborhood in a devoted solid and crew, a few of whom had been educated actors and a few merely strangers who turned out to be outstanding and versatile performers.
Crane (who performs Hamlet) and Oosterveen (Polonius) in contrast the technical expertise of appearing throughout the recreation to that of a puppeteer, reciting traces whereas toggling buttons so their avatars might show feelings.
Their experiment culminated in a dwell present that drew a number of hundred viewers (and later, hundreds on YouTube) and received a handful of awards, together with the innovation award on the Stage Awards, a significant theater celebration in Britain.
However the best achievement, maybe, was that they improbably pulled off a full run-through of “Hamlet” in a world of pixelated chaos.
“There’s a line within the movie the place I say, ‘The blimp exploded and all people died, however other than that, every thing was OK,’” Oosterveen mentioned. “I didn’t even imply that as a joke. That’s actually the one factor actually that went fallacious.”
