From The Remarkable Life of Ibelin to Grand Theft Hamlet, how video games became film sets

Film productions often wrestle with shifts in the weather, the threat of the crew going into overtime or the fading of a day’s light. Less common are concerns over the cast slipping off the top of a blimp.

But that was one of the quirks of making Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary about a pair of British actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, who, while idle during the coronavirus pandemic, decided to stage Hamlet within the violent virtual world of the video game Grand Theft Auto.

Shakespeare wrote of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, not thinking about a python loose in a bar or Hamlet wrestling with “to be” on a helipad. Yet Grand Theft Auto might be an oddly appropriate venue for a play where nearly everyone dies.

“The first time Sam did a bit of Shakespeare in that space, he said, ‘I imagine this is what it was like in Shakespeare’s time at the Globe when people would throw apples at you if you were rubbish,’” says Pinny Grylls, who wrote and directed the film with Crane, her husband. “No one’s really watching you but they’re occasionally looking around and listening to the poetry.”

Grand Theft Hamlet, which Mubi will release in cinemas in January, opens with Crane and Oosterveen’s avatars fleeing police and careering into an outdoor amphitheatre. One says, “I wonder if you could stage something here?”