Grand Theft Hamlet: Shakespeare after the end of history

January 2021: the Diamond Casino and Resort, illuminated by floor-to-ceiling computer graphics and blinding slot machines. At one of them (“IMPOTENT RAGE”) sits a man sporting a blue fauxhawk and track pants. He pulls the lever.

He loses. The screen, supervised by the image of the Liberal Superhero, flashes: you are not woke. He wins: you’re a good person.

He loses: downvote.

“This is too much like fucking life.”

The fauxhawked man, later revealed to be actor Sam Crane, abandons the casino, punches the valet in the face, and runs up the hills of Los Santos to evade the cops. He and his accomplice, actor Mark Oosterveen, seek cover in the Vinewood Bowl. Here, they conceive a plan that will become the subject of the film Grand Theft Hamlet: stage a Shakespearean tragedy entirely within the world of Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Hamlet, having earned the Grand Jury Prize for documentary feature at SXSW 2024, was released theatrically by MUBI in January 2025. Directed by married couple Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, it documents Sam and Mark’s production from inception to debut. The film takes the form of a Youtube gamer playthrough, if derailed by a months-long DIY side quest. It is composed entirely of in-game footage; Sam, Mark, Pinny, and the cast of the play-within-the-film appear to us only as their GTA avatars.

Such impersonal visual form effects (maybe necessitates) a hyperpersonal audio form: the headset. The streams of consciousness of Sam and Mark on mic establish the film’s narration. This structure lends itself to a vulnerable, at times over-expository, tone, that of a scripted brunch between Real Housewives.

“It’s like Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget. Everything is possible. Like, if Elon Musk ends up deciding to put on a version of Shakespeare in L.A., then maybe they could match this in the real world. Other than that, there’s no way you could ever be faced with the random problems we've been trying to kind of get past.”

The random problems include of course scheduling across time zones and the actors getting “wasted” by strangers, but also recasting the titular Hamlet as the original actor gets an IRL job and slips away back into the real world. It’s a turning point that almost pushes Sam to give up, until Mark reminds him aggressively that the play is all he has.

At the climax of the film, co-directors Sam and Pinny argue over mic outside the Los Santos airport. In real life the couple is bubbled together mid-pandemic with their two children, and has spent the day in separate rooms in front of separate computers.

Pinny confronts Sam, “it’s like playing this game has become everything to you. I mean, what about the kids? What about me?”

Sam points his gun at the NPCs watching them.

Pinny presses him again: “you missed my birthday.”

Sam wants to give her a hug, but doesn’t have the code for that emote. She reminds him that physically, she’s right upstairs. They log off.

Dramatic scenes like this are scattered randomly throughout the film, typically without prelude or resolution. When accused in interviews of faking these segments, Crane invokes John Grieson’s definition of documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality.”

It’s true that documentary is subjective. Any depiction of “reality” is made of curated samples that assemble the filmmaker’s personal fiction. This raises the question, though, of why Crane and Grylls assembled this fiction in particular. It’s a fiction of a family in crisis, their single friend’s lonely meltdown, and unemployment with no end in sight. Why? The film was really about the novelty of the idea. The forced narrative of GTH was an afterthought. It might be more worthwhile to treat it as such.

All narrative quirks aside, the stars-creators of Grand Theft Hamlet can be credited for accessing a new arena, and actually seeing through the major undertaking that followed. The film ends with a successful Baz Luhrman-esque premiere, but this doesn’t ultimately resonate as a conclusion. I interpret the success as a seed for something the creators likely did not have in mind.

The arena of Grand Theft Auto is flat, boundaryless urbanity. You are not only anonymous and thus free to reject polite norms, but expected to do so. During the woke era, video games remained as the last holdout for this kind of mainstream social amorality. First-person gaming culture engages in a dialect of extremism that really reflects the opposite: complete neutrality. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Meanwhile, on social media, the left dominated, enforcing total moral sanitation: trigger warnings, language policing, identity politics abound. The pandemic (and conception period of Grand Theft Hamlet) brought this mode to a boiling point and around 2022, the pendulum slowly began to swing away from rules, and closer to the anarchy of the early internet age.

All this to say, the separation between the virtual worlds of far-left and alt-right is beginning to fade. To a generation exhausted by its own rules, the GTA landscape begins to look more and more like paradise. This dissolution of highbrow art parallels the Elizabethean era, when most of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. Shakespeare was popular culture, using rude language and accessible to the lower class, but also performed to and rumored to be commissioned by the Queen’s court. He was an equalizer. Somewhere along the lines of history, we began treating it as high art, stripping access and sometimes even combining the plays with “lower” or more common art forms like rap or comic books as an ironic gimmick. Grand Theft Hamlet reminds us that Shakespeare is and has always been for the people.

One GTA user, ParTebMosMir, stumbles upon the Hamlet auditions and tells the performer, “you caught me – I have ADHD so I don’t concentrate, but you actually caught me concentrating on you.” The words were so arresting, it freed him from a limiting belief likely imposed on him by being chronically online. Parteb decides at that moment to audition himself by reciting the Quran in Arabic, and ultimately becomes the production’s key security guard, just because.

This is a key takeaway, to do something just because you feel moved, and release expectation. Maybe people are sick of the meaning being shown to them. Of being told what to do. Maybe people want to figure that out for themselves, and maybe that search is where the meaning can be found. The artistic arena of Grand Theft Auto proposes freeing art from politic, or letting art create a new politic. Art doesn’t just have to enforce. It can reflect– or at its best, it can create.