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Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 263

When live performance shut down in London for the third time during the COVID-19 pandemic, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen weren’t sure when—or if—they’d ever be onstage again. So, they turned to an unexpected venue: Grand Theft Auto Online. The sprawling, open-world video game, set in a fictionalized version of Los Angeles called Los Santos, is best known for fast cars, chaotic and often criminal missions, and player-driven mayhem. It also has an amphitheater. Amid the game’s unpredictable violence, they decided to stage Hamlet—it would be the first ever complete performance of a Shakespeare play within a video game.

Filmmaker Pinny Grylls joined them and turned the experiment into a documentary: Grand Theft Hamlet. Shot entirely within the game, the film won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival. “A startling example of using any tools at your disposal to make memorable art,” said the Rotten Tomatoes website. “Grand Theft Hamlet’s experimental approach does justice by the Bard.”

In this episode, Crane and Grylls talk about performance,  friendship, and grief during lockdown, as well as how one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays unexpectedly resonated with a virtual cast of strangers and a world in isolation. The result is both funny and poignant, and as surprising as live theater itself.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 1, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Simon Russell Beale on Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Titus

Pinny Grylls

Co-Director

Pinny Grylls

Sam Crane

Co-Director

Sam Crane

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Transcript

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: from the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

In the video game series Grand Theft Auto, you play a criminal in fictionalized versions of real cities. So, typically, you do criminal things like stealing cars, beating people up, or smuggling drugs.

But Grand Theft Auto is an open world game, which means you could choose to do any of those things or something completely different.

You could drive around town all day listening to the radio. Or you could put on a play, which is exactly what the actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen chose to do during the pandemic.

Sam’s partner, filmmaker Pinny Grylls, decided to turn their quest to stage Hamlet inside the game into a documentary. The resulting film, Grand Theft Hamlet, has all the backstage drama of putting on a play in the real world. Except they’re performing for an audience full of heavily armed trigger happy gamers.

Here are Pinny Grylls and my friend, Sam Crane, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

———————–

BARBARA BOGAEV: Before we get into the real story, I think you guys better explain how this game works. So, Sam, you were the Grand Theft Auto addict, at least in the beginning, so, why don’t you do the honors for us?

SAM CRANE: Okay, so, Grand Theft Auto, it’s what they call an open world game. So, it’s basically a kind of recreation of Los Angeles. The city that the game is set in Los Santos, which is like this…

BOGAEV: Right, this version of it.

CRANE: This version, this digital version of Los Angeles and it’s a big, big map there. You get in there and you can wander around the streets. You can go down to the beach. You can see the pier, it’s like a version of Santa Monica Pier, it looks the same and you can walk along the pier, and you can go and see all these people wandering around on it. And then you can get in your car and drive up the highway along the side of the ocean. You can actually swim in the ocean. You go to mountains, you can climb up them. You can go to nightclubs. It’s like living a version of a life, but inside a video game and you are controlling your avatar, going around this digital city. And the thing—

BOGAEV: Such freedom. Such freedom in the middle of COVID, yeah.

PINNY GRYLLS: That’s the thing. It’s open world, but it’s also online.

CRANE: Yeah, that’s an important thing to say.

GRYLLS: So, I think that is important. Because there’s two different versions of Grand Theft Auto. There’s the story mode, which is when you jump into this story and then you follow basically a series of like, challenges which you have to overcome.

CRANE: And that’s just you playing on your own on your base station.

GRYLLS: That’s just you playing on your own.

BOGAEV: Right, but this involves players all over the world and people jumping on.

CRANE: Yeah, so, they have an online game, you’re jumping in, and you are with, like, 30 other people who could be from anywhere in the world.

BOGAEV: And you should mention the violence. I mean, a lot of video games are violent. Computer games are violent. But this one’s particularly violent and anything can happen at any given moment, right? Someone can just come up and blow you away.

CRANE: Absolutely. I guess the way people normally play this game is, you jump in there and you go and do heists. Or sometimes you go around and—

GRYLLS: Steal cars.

CRANE: Steal cars, shoot people, you know.

GRYLLS: And the surprising thing is, is that I, you know, I’m a forty-something-year-old woman and I’m a mom. I’ve never played a computer game before. And Sam had been on computer games, but I was always quite disapproving of him and my son as well, who used to play. Because they were doing this thing and they had this idea of this project. I was like, “Well, I’m just going to jump in there and join them and see what it’s like.” I was expecting to absolutely hate it and not enjoy myself but within about 30 seconds I was shooting people, stealing cars, and I was quite shocked.

BOGAEV: And we see this in the documentary.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

GRYLLS: Oh my God, who’s he?

MAN: I’m gonna mess you up.

SAM: Oh, f***. Are you all right?

GRYLLS: Yeah, someone just tried to steal my car, so I just kind of killed him. I’m a grown, big -ass woman.

GRYLLS: You kind of find another version of yourself when you go in there. It’s really quite amazing.

CRANE: I guess you’re able to do things that you can’t do in real life. There’s that kind of sense of freedom in that.

GRYLSS: Sense of play.

BOGAEV: Just one more technical thing so people understand how this all works. The players can talk to each other while they’re playing. You can turn on your mic and you’re talking to each other and that’s what we hear in the documentary. And we see everything that’s happening from the point of view of different players in this documentary. So, you’re all recording your play. That’s how this movie, it looks, it’s all immersive inside this game and it switches point of view from player to player.

Okay, so, Sam, before all of this started, you and your friend, Mark, who was also very depressed at this time, third lockdown in COVID in Britain, and he is not married. He lives alone, and it sounds like the last person in his family had passed away at some point in this period. So, he was really down. I just picture you both playing the game in your respective houses. And Mark sounds like he’s just so down because he is all alone and unemployed. Is that pretty much where this started?

CRANE: Yeah, I think so. That’s the thing. As sort of difficult as I found it in lockdown and depressing and, particularly for me, you know, professional prospects that I saw disintegrating around me. And also, the way I had defined myself. I had my family with me. I had that, you know, Pinny and our children. We had that whereas a lot of people, I think that the real struggle was for people who were living on their own and that kind of real deep loneliness when you’re not allowed to go out and socialize in the real—in the normal way. You realize how important that is, especially for people who live on their own. So, yeah, he was really struggling.

GRYLLS: We were very worried about him. Yeah, very worried.

BOGAEV: And that comes across in the documentary. So, you and he would get together, and you were playing the game. I think at some point you two were being chased by the cops, and you end up in the game’s version of the Hollywood Bowl, which is a big open-air amphitheater. Tell us what happened then.

CRANE: So, yeah, often what happens in the game, you end up getting chased by the police. You get this wanted rating and you have to run away from them. So, we drove away.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

CRANE: It’s flashing, yeah, just run up these hills.

CRANE: And then we came across, yeah, this theater space, like it’s the Hollywood Bowl. It’s interesting because this space, not as far as I know, it’s not used in any of the in-game missions, so it’s not somewhere there’s a reason for you to go to normally. So, we hadn’t been there before.

[Clip from Grand Theft Hamlet]

CRANE: Ooh, look at this!

OOSTERVEEN: Look at what?

CRANE: Look, it’s like a massive kind of arena. Oh my God, this is so cool.

CRANE: It’s this beautifully kind of classical ideal of a theater. It’s like, you know, based on a Greek theater format, with an outdoor stage and big rakes of seats going up.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

CRANE: I wonder if you could actually, um, stage something here.

OOSTERVEEN: What, like, put on a play?

CRANE: Yeah. Oh, that looks so cool. Alright, do something. Do a, do a…

OOSTERVEEN: What? Like one of your…

CRANE: Yeah, so it’s a bit of Shakespeare.

CRANE: Like, as actors, you have little speeches from Shakespeare that you know, that you might have auditioned with, or maybe you did at drama school, or maybe you were in a show. So, I said, “Just go up, you know, do a speech.”

BOGAEV: Such a director in you, coming out in the game.

CRANE: Yeah, but I just kind of wanted to see it. And he did the bit from, actually from Macbeth.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5]

OOSTERVEEN: Life’s a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

CRANE: And it just immediately—watching his avatar kind of stroll around on the stage, deliver this speech to me—I was like, “This really is something. This is so exciting.” It, kind of, does connect somehow with this Shakespearean language.

GRYLLS: It did seem to connect. As well, I think that particular speech from Macbeth, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” which is about time and about death and about, you know, the fact that we’ve got a brief time on this stage. Shakespeare does talk about this in a lot of his plays actually. You know, he says, “We’re all actors, really,” which I think is very profound and I think in the context of the—

BOGAEV: —and just the tedium too, the tedium of time, the tedium of COVID.

GRYLLS: Yeah, the tedium.

CRANE: And the, kind of, the heavy awareness of death at that time as well.

GRYLLS: Yeah. When you are playing Grand Theft Auto, there’s a kind of tickertape at the bottom that comes up, “So-and-so’s died. So-and-so’s taken their easy way out,” all the different players that have been killed which is sort of reminiscent of what was happening on the news at the time, which I actually only realized after I edited the film. I was like, “Well, gosh, there’s the real resonance there.”

But also, the Shakespeare itself was—the language—was speaking to the situation we were in. I think that’s why, in a funny kind of way, we decide to carry on with what we were doing.

BOGAEV: Like I said, yeah, layers and layers and layers. So, in that scene in the film, it looks like you immediately invited people playing at the time to a performance. But things go very awry.

CRANE: Yeah. First of all, I was amazed that anyone turned up. Like, we actually had two people who happened to be in the server who actually turned up. That was the first major shock for me.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

CRANE: If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other, and don’t kill the actors either. Yeah. Start, start, Mark. You start.

[Hamlet, Act 1, scene 1]

BERNARDO (OOSTERVEEN):  Who’s there?

FRANCISCO (SAM): Nay, answer me! Stand and unfold yourself!

BERNARDO: Long live the king!

FRANCISCO: Bernardo?

BERNARDO: He.

FRANCISCO: You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO: ‘Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO: For this relief much thanks. ‘Tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

BERNARDO: Have you had quiet guard?

FRANCISCO: Not a mouse stirring.    

BOGAEV: Well, they also start just wasting everyone.

GRYLLS: Yeah.

BOGAEV: And each other. That’s such an auspicious start.

GRYLLS: Oh yeah. But you recorded that, and you put it online as a little YouTube video and everyone just went wild for it, didn’t they?

CRANE: Yeah. I genuinely was at the time really kind of amazed because before that the previous time I had performed was just before, as COVID was kind of starting, I was doing this one person show and the audiences were really dwindling. You really felt it.

GRYLLS: It was very depressing.

CRANE: I was like, “I could end up doing this to no one.” So, the fact that two people actually turned up was amazing.

GRYLLS: It gave you a boost.

CRANE: It gave me a boost and actually, it did feel like—I felt that kind of adrenalized rush you get from performing on a real stage, anything can happen now, and especially when they started shooting each other and us. Then the police turned up. It was kind of electric and incredibly dramatic.

BOGAEV: It is incredibly dramatic and very funny, and just very improvised. It has that live feeling. And there’s so little happening in COVID, I can imagine this must have been so exciting.

So, Pinny, this is where you got involved. I imagine, were you a kind of Grand Theft Auto widow, at this point? Was Sam just playing all the time?

GRYLLS: Slightly. Well, I think everyone was online a lot, weren’t they? Because there was not much else to do, to be honest. I mean, I was gardening. I was doing things outside because I’m a very virtuous person.

BOGAEV: Unlike your good-for-nothing husband. [Laughter]

GRYLLS: Yes, exactly, sitting in a dark room, being depressed in his pants.

CRANE: That’s British pants, which is like boxer shorts.

GRYLLS: They call them knickers, don’t they?

BOGAEV: We call them underpants.

GRYLLS: Underpants, sorry, yeah. So, anyway, I was just like, “Okay.” Watching what he’s doing. He made this YouTube video and I was like, “My god, that’s really, really amazing, actually.” And like it’s also observational documentary filmmaking because he’s literally recording what’s happening as it’s happening, you know?

So, I was like, “Well, can I jump in?” So, I jumped in, and I was like—actually, the thing that I love about this video is its  spontaneity and it’s very, very funny and it’s very, very heartfelt and they’re very sincere in what they’re trying to do. But I was like, “Can we up our game?” Sorry to use a pun. “And actually, like, make it more cinematic?” Because at the moment the footage was very, like a lot of YouTube videos of gaming, very kind of like the camera swinging round, very hectic—if you are like under 15 years old, you can probably watch that for hours, but I, personally, can’t. And I was like, “You know what? I really think we could make a proper film, like a documentary film, with this. And then if I find a way of, like, using the in-game camera, you can basically zoom in and out and you can make closeups and stuff like that.”

So, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to film these guys. I’m going to film their venture. I’m going to interview them like a normal documentary, and I’m going to go with it and see where it takes us.”

BOGAEV: Ah, fantastic. I had no idea this is how the technical side of it worked. You make your avatar, Pinny, and then you guys just have fun together. I think you say in the game, “This is like a date.”

[CLIP Grand Theft Hamlet]

GRYLLS: You make me a drink.

CRANE: If you just come up here.

GRYLLS: How do I slap your arse?  Yeah, I quite fancy you, actually. It’s quite romantic up here, don’t you think?

GRYLLS: Because you see in the game, unlike in real life, he’s, like, really rich and he had all these different apartments and cars and things. So, he is able to show off to me a bit, you know? He is like, “Come on, hon. We’re going to go for a ride in my amazing car, and we’re going to take you to my amazing apartment. We’re going to have a pretend whiskey.” You know? And there was even—

BOGAEV: Suddenly, you have a very rich, rich husband.

GRYLLS: Yeah, exactly, you had a rich husband.

BOGAEV: Yeah, imagine. But you two have a very serious conversation, too, at this point.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

GRYLLS: Sam?

CRANE: Mm-hmm.

GRYLLS: Are you okay?

CRANE: Yeah, I’m, well. I mean, not really. No, it’s, it’s sh*t. Everything’s sh*t. I have nothing now.

GRYLLS: What about that coding course you’re doing, though?

CRANE: Yeah, it’s like that, um, government advert they put out with that picture of a ballet dancer, and it says “Fatima is now retraining in tech”, and I just see that and it just is a knife through my heart because that’s me. I am Fatima, and my dreams and Fatima’s dreams have been ripped away from them.

BOGAEV: Had you had this conversation about really your bad emotional state outside of the game or was being in the game what made it possible? And I guess I should ask you, Sam.

CRANE: I mean I guess we’d probably had versions of this conversation several times.

GRYLLS: Several times.

CRANE: Several times, for a while, you know, talking about—

GRYLLS: Well, he started a coding course, you know, as you hear in the clip.

CRANE: Yeah.

GRYLLS: —and I found this actually incredibly depressing because this was a man who, you know, has spent his whole life on stage at the Globe and the National Theatre, all these amazing places in London and the UK, and, you know, he was quite high up in his career, a well respected actor, and then he was having to do a coding course.

CRANE: Well, I was just trying to think of what, you know, presuming that we’d never be able to do that again—

GRYLLS: There’s nothing wrong with doing a coding course, but it’s just that thing of—like there was this depressing advert, which we talk about, which was a picture of a ballerina, and it says, “Fatima can retrain in tech,” and he’s like, “Aw.”

CRANE: It was just sort of symptomatic at the time of what felt like a government attitude to the arts that was like, “Okay, well this is an excuse to kind of get everyone, you know, into tech.”

GRYLLS: Get rid of you.

CRANE: And then we can kind of manage that better, and it’s more economically productive, maybe.

GRYLLS: Yeah

BOGAEV: I think what we hear listening or watching your documentary is just, you know, the emotion and also how the video game kind of allows people to talk, maybe, in ways that they’re not talking in their real lives.

GRYLLS: I certainly felt that with Mark because I felt like, you know, obviously he was going through a particularly difficult time as well and I guess it’s a bit like when you’re driving a car and you don’t have to look at each other directly. So, you are looking at a version of each other, but it sort of allows a certain intimacy, which is interesting.

CRANE: And honesty. Yeah, emotional honesty, maybe.

BOGAEV: I have to ask, since it’s a Shakespeare podcast, why Hamlet? I mean, everyone knows Romeo and Juliet, too. I can imagine you could have done that. And it’s also full of death and violence, just like Grand Theft Auto. So why Hamlet?

CRANE: I think there’s lots of reasons, some of which were probably more kind of conscious and intentional at the beginning. I think a big one for me was, “Yeah, okay, everyone knows Romeo and Juliet but I think Hamlet is, like, the one that’s the kind of cultural phenomenon.” It’s like the most famous bit of literature in the world, probably.

GRYLLS: And Grand Theft Auto is the most famous computer game. Like, even if you’ve not heard of like any other video games, you would’ve heard of that one.

CRANE: Like it has this cultural weight, yeah, an I think I was looking for something that had that equivalent that people watching, it could go, “Oh yeah, I know what Hamlet is” or, “I think I know what Hamlet is, even if I’ve never seen it, never read it or anything.”

GRYLLS: But also what’s really interesting is we thought that Los Santos was actually the perfect setting for it because it is literally the rotten state of Denmark. You know, it is kind of like this very seemingly glamorous well put together world that, actually, underneath it all is very violent and a bit, sort of, there’s a dirty underbelly that made that game and that play work really well together.

I also think that it’s a play about pretending to be something you’re not. It’s about people putting on masks, about putting on plays within plays. Hamlet is constantly in dialogue with himself about, you know, “What am I? What role do I have to play? What is authenticity?”

CRANE: And it’s also about watching performance. It’s about spectatorship, you know? It’s about Hamlet’s always going, “I’ll tent into the quick and observe his looks.” He’s always watching, and then other people are watching him. You have bits where, you know, Polonius and Claudius sort of set up this mini play where they bring Ophelia along to interact with Hamlet and they’re watching. So, it’s almost like Hamlet is an unknowing performer then.

So, there’s this really interesting, I think, connection between performance and spectatorship in playing video games. Because when you are playing a video game, you see yourself on the screen, so you are always watching yourself but you are also like the protagonist of this story as well. So, you are both the performer and the spectator at the same time and I think Hamlet is a bit like that as well.

BOGAEV: There are all of these resonances and then, on top of it all, it’s hilarious because you’re putting on this show live in the video game with all of these people around the world and you recruit people in Grand Theft Auto to come audition for Hamlet. So, the whole time you’re trying to make this recruitment video, you’re also shooting at assailants with these big, automatic weapons. It’s really hilarious. People playing the game do show up at the Vinewood Bowl later to audition in the game. So how did that go?

GRYLLS: Well, we didn’t expect anyone to turn up, if I’m honest, and at first, it seemed like only one person turned up. That was DJ Phil, and then DJ Phil couldn’t do it.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and you have to tell us about DJ Phil.

GRYLLS: Okay. He looks like a sort of cowboy, yeah, with a bare chest. So, then he descends the stairs and starts speaking.

CRANE: We’re terrified because he’s been beating people up on the way down. And he starts speaking and it’s a woman, it’s a woman’s voice.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

DJ PHIL: I’m a literary agent and a mum, and I love Hamlet, and it seems like my only opportunity to actually audition for Hamlet at the moment is to jump onto my nephew’s GTA.

CRANE: Oh wow. Shit.

CRANE: It was one of those moments where I thought, “Could this really work?”

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Hamlet, Act 5, scene 2]

DJ PHIL: Was ’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not

BOGAEV: You do end up with some real finds. Someone named Nora gives you a great audition at the Vinewood Ball, and also someone who has a Brooklyn accent and sounds to me like Fran Drescher of The Nanny.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5]

JEM COHEN: I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away…

Fare thee well at once!
The glow-worm shows the morning to be near,
And ‘gins to pale his uneffectual fire.

Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me. 

(Laughing and cheering)

GRYLLS: Jem Cohen, who ends up playing Horatio, and actually we find out is a sort of gaming celebrity.

CRANE: Yeah, she’s a voice actor for some big video game.

GRYLLS: Yeah, a competitor.

BOGAEV: You had some great talent show up and then there, of course, is Parteb. And he’s what, half Tunisian and half Finnish? Why don’t you describe him and his avatar?

GRYLLS: He turns up. He is in this massive, like, kind of, blingy car. And he gets out and he’s dressed like an alien or creature of the deep sort of thing.

BOGAEV: Right, like a green, kind of lizard.

GRYLLS: Lizardy person, yeah, and he’s very much enjoying shaking his booty, as you would say in America, and sort of, like, being incredibly badly behaved. Anyway, we said, “Would you want to audition?” I don’t think he was intending to at all but we’d sort of roped him in. He watched someone else’s audition, and he was like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll give it a go.” And we said, “Well, what are you going to do?” And he was not familiar with Shakespeare, so, he said, “Can I do a bit of the Quran?”

[Clip: fragment from the Quran]

BOGAEV: He recited the Quran quite beautifully.

GRYLLS: He really did, beautiful, yeah. It was quite impressive and beautiful. I think that’s the moment actually when the whole film shifts. People have said to me when they watch that that they suddenly realize it’s a quite emotional film. I think up until that point it’s very funny. It’s very entertaining, very unexpected. But when that happens, people are like, “Oh, okay, that’s actually really interesting”

BOGAEV: It is. That is a shift. It’s what makes, I think, your documentary so unique. There are great scenes and you have these emotional shifts from incredible poignancy and beauty to utter comedy and chaos. One of those scenes I’m thinking of is you start rehearsing Hamlet early on, and you’re doing the soliloquy, “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth,” on a rooftop. It’s such an appropriate location as that passage contains an extended metaphor of the earth being a sterile promontory and this majestical rock.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5]

CRANE: My hour is almost come
When I to sulfurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself. 

OOSTERVEEN: No, no, don’t kill him. He’s… that’s Hamlet!

PLAYER: Yo! Ugh…

BOGAEV: But then, tell us what happens.

CRANE: I guess someone, does someone turn up in a helicopter and start shooting at him, I think?

GRYLLS: And kills Hamlet, yeah.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and he throws a hand grenade.

CRANE: Yeah, that’s it.

GRYLLS: Which is a bit too early, because Hamlet’s supposed to die later at the end of the play, of course.

CRANE: But, also, I mean, it is kind of funny and everything, but we were genuinely trying to—we had a kind of time pressure—we’re trying to rehearse this play, and it was kind of getting quite frustrating because someone would turn up and start shooting people, then you’re like, “No, you can’t kill because we are actually trying to do some work.”

GRYLLS: Yeah, it was actually incredibly difficult to organize. It was a bit like herding cats.

BOGAEV: Worse than cats.

GRYLLS: But also, because he had all these different people on different time zones.

BOGAEV: Cats with AR-15s.

CRANE: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

GRYLLS: He had all these different people from around the world with different time schedules—you really weren’t mad with it—the whole thing was essentially producing it with Mark.

CRANE: And I’m sure anyone listening who’s had experience of trying to put on a production of Shakespeare, you know, maybe like a fringe production or a kind of community production or something, you know how hard it is just gathering people together.

GRYLLS: Getting started—

CRANE: —and getting started. So, we had that but then added to that, you know, random strangers turning up with rocket propelled grenades, as well.

GRYLLS: Trying to kill us.

BOGAEV: Right, and just like in real life, some of your actors drop out, including the person you cast as your Hamlet who turns out to be a professional actor. COVID is lifting at this point in the process or in the timeline and he’s landed a role in a real production. He tells you in the game. So, Sam, it sounds like in the scene you were trying to convince Mark that you should quit and Mark got really emotional.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

DIPO: Sam, you’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids, you’ve got other shit going on. I don’t, I don’t have any of those things. I’ve been sitting at home on my own in lockdown with nothing to do.

CRANE: Oh, I’m sorry, man.

DIPO: I mean, you know, one of the few things that I’ve been able to do that I may have lost my mind with, that’s been able to distract me, has been this.

CRANE: It was such hard work just trying to get this production going and there seemed to be so many obstacles. I think as well when Dipo said that, you know, obviously we were delighted for him but—

BOGAEV: —Dipo is your Hamlet.

CRANE: Yeah, maybe feeling a little bit jealous.

GRYLLS: Jealous of this younger man who was successful.

CRANE: Yeah. “Oh, well, we are not getting any job. No one’s asking us to do anything.”

GRYLLS: I think he used the terms, “This is not a real job.” And I think that really upset Mark because it felt real to him because it was the only thing he had in his life at that point. I don’t think we’d quite realized up to that point how important it was to him.

BOGAEV: So, you became Hamlet at this point. Did you do it for you or did you do it for Mark?

GRYLLS: Both.

CRANE: Both, I guess. Yeah, both.

GRYLLS: Well, I said to you, “Look, why don’t you just go off and try a few soliloquies in different locations and just try and connect with the text and take that time to make it your own?” I think we ended up in a dive bar, and Sam and Mark were, like, messing around ad you weren’t even thinking about rehearsing actually. Then, all of a sudden you just started doing, “To be or not to be.”

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1]

CRANE: To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

OOSTERVEEN: The cops are here.

GRYLLS: And I thought immediately there was something about the way the non-playable characters—who are, just to explain, they are the people that populate the game that are not being played by someone, they’re just background characters, NPCs—but they were almost looking, they’re watching you do this soliloquy. Of course it was an illusion, but they seemed to be listening.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

[Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1]

CRANE: …who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

GRYLLS: There was this sense that the game was almost listening to us and egging us on and saying, “Yes, well maybe we want to have you here.” You know, there was a kind of weird magic to it.

BOGAEV: There is a weird magic to it because those characters are drunk. They look like career alcoholics, and they’re very dislocated and desolate, and the words, that combination of the Hamlet and these characters, it’s really haunting. It gets to the most poignant aspect of your project, I think, which is theater does so much to us. It reaches so deep. I’m thinking of another scene very close to this one. At one point you gather together in a quiet corner of a casino after a rehearsal, and one of your actors, Nora, opens up about their own life and the resonance they feel with Hamlet.

[CLIP from Grand Theft Hamlet]

NORA: I recently came out as trans to my family, and then, yeah. So it’s one of those situations where you realize who the people around you are, but also you’re also finding your own truth. That’s why I can relate to Hamlet because he’s finding his own truth, but he’s also realizing what people I like around them. 

GRYLLS: That’s right. This is somebody who when she came to audition said she hadn’t done any Shakespeare since year nine, which I think is when they’re about thirteen, but wanted to be an actor and wanted to try it. And obviously extremely young, only nineteen, and going through a transition to being who she felt she truly was as a woman. It was really interesting because she didn’t have any sort of preconceptions about what you should or shouldn’t say about Hamlet. She very much said what she felt, which was about the fact that the people around you want you to be a certain way but then you feel that you are something different. I just thought, “Wow, this is actually why we’re doing this.” Because, you know, people are getting involved, acting, who are not professionals, who are just getting involved, and they are responding to this ancient text in their own way and it’s very accessible

CRANE: And giving a perspective that, you know, I’d never thought of Hamlet from that perspective before and it was just really enlightening to me.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it gets to not only what gaming can do for you but what theater can open up for you and what kind of place it can make for you.

Well, finally, the big day comes for your live stream performance. So, describe the experience of performing this live. What kind of audience did you have? What was your feeling?

GRYLLS: We had a mixture of audiences. We had some avatar audiences.

CRANE: We had some audience actually in the game with us.

GRYLLS: So, people followed us around like a promenade performance and then there was a streaming audience on YouTube and Twitch. Everything was being seen from my perspective as the filmmaker, so, if I died that means everybody online wouldn’t be able to watch a show anymore or had to respawn anyway. So, that was a bit of a problem.

CRANE: Yeah, it was a high-pressure situation there.

GRYLLS: But lots of things happened serendipitously. That’s the nature of live performance inside a computer game, which I don’t think had ever been done in this way. I think it felt…

CRANE: Yeah, there was that constant threat that everything would kind of collapse into chaos. And I think that it’s really exciting—

BOGAEV: And very much like real theater.

CRANE: Because you have a version of that in any play. That’s the thing about doing performance, live performance—you have a plan, you’ve rehearsed, you have your script and everything—but there’s always a chance it could go terribly wrong, anything could happen, and that’s what gives it the, kind of, frisson, you know? The buzz.

BOGAEV: I watched your film at a screening in Los Angeles very early on and the audience really loved it. Some woman sitting in front of me actually stood up at the end and turned around and—I didn’t know her—asked me if I also felt that this was the future of the whole industry. Like, it was a whole new paradigm.

CRANE: Oh, wow.

GRYLLS: Yes. I mean, okay, so really interesting because obviously what we made was called machinima, that’s the name, which is a combination of machine and cinema. It’s a genre which has been around for about 20 years and it’s making films inside computer games. But we didn’t know anything about this when we started making this film. We just were doing what we were doing, right? We were just thinking, solving problems within the context of where we were, but we later discovered there were all these other artist filmmakers. There’s a collective called Total Refusal, and, you know, they made a film in Red Dead Redemption called Hardly Working that won the European Film awards. So, it is a growing genre.

It’s really interesting because, you know, more and more people are spending time online inside games. They have avatars. They have digital presences. So, telling stories in the places where people are hanging out a lot of the time is important, for documentary in particular.

BOGAEV: I have to ask you, Sam, you already said that Nora’s insight really changed how you were thinking about Hamlet, but has this whole experience given you new and different insights into the play?

CRANE: Yeah, absolutely, these kind of connections that came up that I hadn’t really realized before. When we decided to do it, you know. I hadn’t really thought about Hamlet being someone who’s watching everyone going around playing. And that’s what you’re doing in a video game, isn’t it? This whole kind of connection to playing and, you know, the play’s the thing, and these actions that a man might play.

GRYLLS: Be the players ready.

CRANE: Yeah. All that kind of viewpoint he has on humans as people playing, and you know, that connects the difference between really feeling something or really being something and a kind of playful presentation of it That all just came out so much more strongly and so much more richly seeing it through the lens of this game.

BOGAEV: And Pinny, were you into Shakespeare that much before this?

GRYLLS: Oh yeah, definitely. I’m so lucky, my mom was a theater designer, and she designed a few Shakespeare plays when I was growing up so, I spent a lot of time around that culture. I guess if you are from the UK as well, it’s so much part of our heritage. It’s like, it has to be. You have to learn about it, at least, I think two or three plays at school.

BOGAEV: Right, you can’t avoid it.

CRANE: But I think as well the way you learn about it here often is as this high point of culture and it’s like this thing that’s very elevated in culture. I think that’s not always a very helpful way to look at it because that’s not really what it was about in its origin, you know? It was very much a kind of popular entertainment, very cheap for the people. And I guess that’s something else that I think we discovered through this game as a kind of route back to that.

BOGAEV: Right? We see a lot of headlines these days about how if Shakespeare were alive today he’d be writing for video games.

CRANE: Probably, yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean there is this big kind of connection between plays and games and it makes sense, yeah.

GRYLLS: He’d certainly be poking at the edge of reality.

CRANE: He would, exactly. He’d be doing something for mass audiences.

BOGAEV: Sam, Pinny, thank you so much for this. This was great.

CRANE: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thanks so much for having us. It’s been great to chat with you, yeah, really nice.

GRYLLS: Thanks so much for inviting us.

———————–

KARIM-COOPER: That was Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Grand Theft Hamlet is streaming now on Mubi.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Daniel Gordon in London and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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