4 July 2022: Hamlet is staged. So far, nothing strange. It has been happening more or less continuously since around 1600.

Behind this particular performance of Shakespeare's arcane play are two English friends, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen. Again, nothing unusual: everyone loves Hamlet, but the British have a real fixation with the Prince of Denmark.

Place of performance: Los Santos.

No.

Wait.

Los Santos?

Yes: the very, very Los Angeles-like city (there's even a neighbourhood that's a Pacific Palisades look-alike) that serves as the backdrop for GTA V, one of the best-selling, most talked-about, most loved and most hated video games in history.

Grand TheftHamlet was the first representation of Shakespeare'sHamlet within a video game. More precisely, inside GTA Online, the multiplayer version of GTA V: a virtual urban space where players from all over the world gather to have fun-which, usually, means armed robberies, contract killings and the occasional nightclub ride. A world that Scottish development studio Rockstar North has constructed as a caricature and an acceleration of the grittier, more grotesque face of the United States. Los Santos, ‘a place of super capitalism’, as one character says in the film.
 

While fleeing from a robbery, Crane and Oosterveen climb a hill to lose the police and discover a huge amphitheatre. From there, the idea: to stage Hamlet in GTA Online. It is the height of Covid, the theatres are closed, the actors are out of work. These are strange months, those in which we are convinced that NFT and the Metaverse are smart ideas. Virtual worlds become essential for the isolated. So why not exploit them to make theatre? In Shakespeare's time, the plague had already forced theatres to close. But in Los Santos, anything is possible.

A crazy and beautiful idea, told in the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, distributed by Mubi and filmed entirely inside GTA. The rumours are true, but there are no flesh and blood bodies: just avatars moving around Los Santos, a city that some know better than home, others not at all. Suffice it to say that it is violent and the sights are incredible. Everything becomes scenery: the yachts and airships, the bars and the beach.

The show won the prestigious Stage Award for innovation in 2023; the documentary is doing even better, picking up hits at festivals and earning a nomination for the Bafta 2025, the British Oscars. It has generated debate in publications as diverse as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Verge, Polygon, New Yorker, through to film and theatre magazines such as Roger Ebert, Vulture and BroadwayWorld.

But what exactly is Grand Theft Hamlet? Is it still theatre if the human body is missing? Is it a tragedy? Or perhaps a new genre?
 

After all, for years watching video games-not playing them, watching them-has been one of the most popular activities online. There is even a dedicated platform, Twitch. Wasn't it inevitable that all this would evolve? Have we underestimated the potential of video games? And anyway, isn't it already extraordinary just to want to resist the ultra-violence that permeates the gaming world to create something different, to make art?

The film starts off unconnected, almost alienating, but grows like a wave. It tells of the tragicomic difficulties of putting on a play in a completely alien context. ‘We come across people that want to help us and we don't know them and this gives me hope,’ says one of the protagonists. The encounters are memorable: Dollah101, the designated hero who later drops out for a minor part; DjPhil, a woman who uses her nephew's avatar to participate; ParTebMosMir, a creature in a reptilian costume who recites the Koran during the audition and ends up doing security, defending the company from attacks. But this does not stop the players from dying several times during the rehearsals. Eventually, though, the show gets made.

And so Grand Theft Hamlet is charged with a new, unexpected poetry. There is a quarrel between Sam Crane and his wife Pinny Grylls (who is also co-director of the film): a real quarrel, but staged within the game, with a small crowd watching as they shout at each other. There is a final monologue, recited in front of the most imposing, cruel, rain-discoloured and sunburnt Los Santos, already old, like a postcard of a digital world that millions of people inhabit and then forget every day. ‘The combination of absolute stunning beauty and grotesque and horrible, horrible violence as well.’

And then there is that monologue, to be or not to be, the single most famous piece of theatre ever, which is rehearsed everywhere: on a rooftop, on a cliff, in the most impossible places. But the most powerful version takes place in a seedy bar, where the police break in and kill everyone.

Wasted. Butchered! The writing that takes up the whole screen when you die in GTA. But what is Hamlet, if not a massacre in which-to make a long story short-everyone dies? ‘Shakespeare is so brutal,’ say the protagonists. Only in the video game you die and are reborn, again and again. It is death taken to the extreme and, at the same time, emptied of meaning.

And when, on 4 July 2022, the play ends, the players finally do what they have been avoiding all along: they kill each other.

And then they go off to celebrate.

You can stream Grand Theft Hamlet on Mubi (subscription is required)