Play’s the Thing in Grand Theft Hamlet

March 2020. The global film industry went into COVID lockdown. Like every filmmaker, British documentarian Pinny Grylls was left wondering: What next?

Initially, she recalled, she was optimistic that the shutdown would be over in weeks. But as weeks became months, she said, “I thought, how can I make documentaries when I can’t go out in the real world?”

The question seemed even more pressing since her husband, stage actor Sam Crane, was facing the same conundrum – “an existential crisis,” as he put it, having just lost a dream job as lead in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Grylls said, “He went from being the busiest actor in the world [to] suddenly, he came home from rehearsal and said, ‘It’s over.’”

Their solution was simple. Take up online gaming.

Or rather, use gaming as their new creative endeavor, Grand Theft Hamlet, which world premieres Sunday at South by Southwest. Crane decided to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet within Grand Theft Auto V, and Grylls would use in-game footage to catch the behind-the-scenes struggles.

Those struggles are pretty much like those of mounting any other theatrical production, just as Grylls had caught in documentaries about the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House. However, those venues came with a much smaller risk of getting murked by a 14-year-old pretending to be a Russian mobster.

Two decades ago, when pioneering shows like Red vs. Blue from Austin’s Rooster Teeth were first experimenting with machinima (the art of using game footage for narratives), it was written off as cheap animation for nerds. For Crane, that was part of the broader snobbery against gaming, but now “people are getting that this is a culturally valid art form.”

It was their preteen son, Kit, who lit the gaming spark in them. However, they weren’t in front of the screen when it happened. Crane explained that every day during lockdown they would take a family stroll, “and then you start chatting because you’re walking, and our son, he was telling us about things he was watching on YouTube and games he was playing. He told me about Dream, who’s a Minecraft streamer who was creating these massive, ongoing narrative dramas in Minecraft with his YouTuber mates.”

Having barely touched a console since he was a kid himself, Crane suddenly found the possibilities of elaborately designed massive multiplayer games opened to him. “I saw what people were doing and went, ‘This place is amazing. This is so intensely dramatic and amazing, and someone can shoot you at any moment.”

There was also a therapeutic and communal aspect to suddenly spending so much time online. It kept Crane in remote contact with fellow actor Mark Oosterveen, who would eventually be cast as Polonius to Crane’s Hamlet. “They were like two little boys, having an absolute laugh,” Grylls said. “I was watching it, and said, ‘You’ve got to record what you’re doing because it’s really cool.’”

It was Grylls who approached the British Film Institute about turning that in-game footage into a documentary. However, the filmmakers also had the support of Rockstar Games, the studio behind GTA. Crane said that they told him that this was what they always hoped would happen. “Yes, of course it’s a big mission-based thing, but it is a sandbox.”

---

Grand Theft Hamlet

Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere

Sunday, March 10, 11:45am, Alamo South Lamar
Tuesday, March 12, 11:30am, Rollins Theatre at the Long Center
Wednesday, March 13, 10pm & 10:30pm, Alamo South Lamar

---

Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle's SXSW 2024 coverage.