Charting a production of “Hamlet” put on entirely inside “Grand Theft Auto” by two actors, the new film makes it clear that the Bard and virtual violence are not so different, literature and gaming experts say.
Usually when theater performers say, “The show must go on,” they’re not talking about one member of the audience blowing up another with a rocket launcher or the cast falling off a blimp mid-scene. Then again, most theatrical productions aren’t performed in “Grand Theft Auto.”
A new documentary, “Grand Theft Hamlet,” chronicles a pandemic-era experiment in which two U.K. actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, put on an entirely virtual production of “Hamlet” through the massively popular video game “Grand Theft Auto V.” The film has gained attention for how it combines one of the most classic of Shakespeare classics with one of the most (in)famous games in history. However, literature and gaming experts at Northeastern University say the film is a challenge to those who might think Shakespeare and video games are all that different.
“We can think of Shakespeare as being this very refined, erudite, remote writer that’s difficult and challenging … but it’s not,” says Tomas Elliott, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University in London. “Theater was the great popular entertainment of the 16th and 17th century. It was also the kind of cutting-edge technology of the time period and was trying to appeal as much as possible to popular audiences. As a result, in something like Shakespearean tragedy you have the same kinds of extreme violence that you get in video games.”
“Grand Theft Hamlet” is not purely a recorded version of the performance but instead tells the story of how the creatives behind the project came up with the idea, auditioned actors and wrangled a theatrical production in a game where a random player can fly a virtual fighter jet onto the “stage” at any point during the performance.
By showing how Crane and Oosterveen put on their version of “Hamlet,” the film draws some unexpected parallels between the appeal of theater and video games, Elliott says.
“When we watch a tragedy, we want to experience the pain and suffering of the characters on stage, but we also want to know that they’re going to get up again at the end of the play just like your avatar in ‘Grand Theft Auto’ is going to revive themselves and be able to try again,” Elliott says.
For as novel as it might seem, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is traditional in its own way. Every generation and every new medium reinterprets Shakespeare and has done so for centuries.
Filmmaking inside video game worlds is also not necessarily new. The long-running, massively popular comedic web series “Red vs. Blue,” which launched in 2003, was made using the first-person shooter “Halo.”
However, centering the Bard and releasing the film in theaters puts more eyes on “Grand Theft Hamlet” and puts it in a position to challenge some of the assumptions about both Shakespeare and gaming.
“The people who think Shakespeare is inaccessible high art don’t know Shakespeare, and the people who think GTA is just murdering prostitutes haven’t played GTA,” says Brandon Sichling, associate teaching professor of game design at Northeastern.
As the film makes clear, performing Shakespeare in a video game world comes with technical and creative challenges. There is the inherent complication that comes with an audience whose virtual avatars can at any time derail the production with virtual violence. But there are also the technical limitations of what developer Rockstar Games’ system allows players to express, Sichling says.
Players can’t control their avatars’ facial expressions or body language beyond a limited set of actions, which poses a problem in theater where physicality and emoting are the primary tools for an actor. Add to that, the audience and performers being in their own virtual bubbles instead of in a communal, physical space and there are already countless barriers to entry.
However, Sichling says the fact that “Grand Theft Hamlet” even exists at all calls into question the very idea of what “virtual” is –– and what form theater can take.
“Sure, it’s digital and it’s not the real world the way this is the real world, but it’s actual [and] it’s happening as much as theater does,” Sichling says.
At a time when anxieties are high around how artificial intelligence will impact Hollywood and the arts, posing those questions allows the film to shed much needed light on how humans will always find a way to work with –– and around –– technology to create things that only humans can create.
“This is one of the most powerful things that I think art and artists can do with technology, which is to inject this imaginative human creativity into a machine that is, in a sense, designed to work one way,” Elliott says. “I think that tells us something, particularly in this age of AI and oversaturated media, that human creativity still counts for something.”