Grand Theft Hamlet is the Shakespeare-GTA mash-up you never knew you wanted

William Shakespeare and Grand Theft Auto have more in common than you realise. As well as being cultural behemoths that smartly satirise and dissect the depraved depths of mankind, both are educational tools for children on the concept of free will, the fragility of a capitalist society, and the repercussions of bloody, vengeful murder, whether that victim is the Prince of Denmark or an NPC that’s crossing the road too slowly. Really, whatever you pick up from Henry V at school, you could glean from GTA V in your bedroom, except one is in iambic pentameter, the other is made up of curse words from whoever’s joined your online server.

The directors of Grand Theft Hamlet – a surprisingly heartfelt and unsurprisingly hilarious machinima movie that takes place entirely within the world of Grand Theft Auto – believe that Shakespeare was, in fact, the Grand Theft Auto of its time. “Shakespeare was mass popular entertainment,” says Pinny Grylls, who co-directed the film with her husband, Sam Crane. “People would have been drunk in the audience, throwing apples at the actors if they weren’t good. It would have been bawdy and violent, but also beautiful and poetic. That’s what we found inside Grand Theft Auto.”

“People who have never played Grand Theft Auto have an idea of what it is,” says Crane, sat next to Grylls on a Zoom call from their home in Hackney. “It has this notoriety of being an incredibly violent game with societal problems associated with it. But once you play it, you realise it’s an incredibly sophisticated space, and so beautiful to look at.”

To prove the game’s cinematic qualities, Crane and Grylls, a duo in their 40s, are releasing their debut feature in theatres, showcasing the pixelated, occasionally glitchy world of Los Santos as if it were a traditional blockbuster. I caught it at a sold-out London Film Festival screening at BFI IMAX where the audience repeatedly roared in laughter like it was an old-school Judd Apatow comedy. On a screen 80 times the size of my laptop, the images were hypnotic, uncanny, and disarming. “I was looking for ways to film it so that it didn’t just have a gaming aesthetic,” says Grylls. “It has a stillness, an atmosphere, and emotion.”

Technically, Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary, just with exploding CGI heads instead of traditional talking heads. During lockdown in 2021, Crane and Mark Oosterveen, both theatre actors out of work, were playing Grand Theft Auto when they challenged themselves to stage a production of Hamlet within the in-game environment, and to record their progress. They envisioned a live stream of the play that would be carried out by a troupe of online gamers who meet at the same point in the map, and then recite the Bard through their customised form while dodging bullets and flamethrowers from outsiders, trolls, and anyone playing GTA in the traditional fashion.

[Grand Theft Auto] has this notoriety of being an incredibly violent game with societal problems associated with it. But once you play it, you realise it’s an incredibly sophisticated space, and so beautiful to look at

– Sam Crane

An open call for auditions leads to performers from around the world arriving in their chosen avatar, including a trans actress, Nora, who faces discrimination from casting directors when in her real-life body, and an unemployed Uber driver with a broken leg who’s snuck a PlayStation into his hospital bed. A frequent scene-stealer is ParTeb, a Finnish-Tunisian gamer who – in his custom build as a green, butt-shaking alien – wishes to watch, not audition, and volunteers as a bodyguard. At one point, ParTeb recites a passage from the Qu’aran. “People think it’s just teenage boys who play Grand Theft Auto, and they’re going to keep blowing you up,” says Crane. “But there’s diversity to the people you come across in the game.”

While Crane’s background is predominantly as an actor – he played Harry Potter in the West End’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Grylls comes from documentaries. Within the game, avatars have their own smartphones with in-built cameras; Grylls uses this function to record the actors as if she were there with them. “It was like filming a documentary about puppets that don’t behave themselves,” says Grylls. “The puppetry performance doesn’t go perfectly, and I’ve got to make sure it tells a story.”

A portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema”, machinima is a genre that’s existed for decades, albeit rarely in the mainstream. Examples range from 1996’s Diary of a Camper (a 96-second short combining the first-person shooter Quake with on-screen text) to Celine Song, the director of Past Lives, streaming her version of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull on The Sims 4 via Twitch in 2020. Grylls cites Jacky Connolly, a filmmaker who specialises in Grand Theft Auto and The Sims, as an inspiration, while Crane sought advice from an Austrian collective, Total Refusal, whose award-winning short, Hardly Working, takes place entirely within Red Dead Redemption.

Nevertheless, Grand Theft Hamlet still unfolds as a traditional three-act film with a linear structure, an end goal, and obstacles to overcome. Will they find enough participants? Will the actors turn up on the day? Will Crane and Grylls’ marriage survive the pandemic? In a scene caught on camera – or, rather, within the game, but the conversation is recorded through microphones – Grylls lambasts Crane for forgetting her birthday, and paying more attention to the game than her. Although the couple live together with their children, the argument unfolds in separate rooms through their respective gaming avatars.

It was like filming a documentary about puppets that don’t behave themselves. The puppetry performance doesn’t go perfectly, and I’ve got to make sure it tells a story

– Pinny Grylls

“I wouldn’t say we scripted anything,” says Crane.

“We didn’t script anything,” says Grylls, more firmly.

“Sometimes the audio in the game is unintelligible, so you rerecord bits,” says Crane. “Or things didn’t happen in the game, so you recreate it in the game. But it’s all stuff that happened.”

What about the argument?

“The argument was a real argument that happened in two parts,” says Grylls. “The night before, I told Sam he’d forgotten my birthday, and he’d spent the whole day online. I was really furious. The next morning, I got up at 6:30, and he’s already online. I was like, ‘Right, I’m going to go inside the game, and find him.’ It’s annoying that people are like, ‘That can’t have happened in real life.’ It really did. The argument was an hour long but edited down to two minutes.”

“We did want to give it the feeling of an entertaining story,” says Crane. “Sometimes documentaries can be like eating your vegetables.”

The duo tease forthcoming projects together that involve “lots of different games”, while Grylls, who is hard of hearing, is working on fiction films that tackle deafness. Although I started off our Zoom interview with the avatar of a panda in a green hoodie to honour the film’s celebration of internet anonymity, I eventually have to reveal myself so that she can read my lips through the webcam. They inform me that every screening of Grand Theft Hamlet will contain captions.

“So often, a film will have one captioned screening in its run, which means that people who are hard of hearing or deaf will have only one opportunity to see the film,” says Crane. “On social media, everything is captioned, and it’s an expectation, I think, for young people. They’re used to watching stuff with captions. I think older generations need to fucking get over this idea that captions will ruin the cinematic experience. We think every screening of every film should be captioned.”

Grand Theft Hamlet is released in UK & Irish cinemas by Tull Stories on 6 December, then streaming globally on MUBI in early 2025