Grand Theft Auto and Shakespeare are not two things you would normally put together. But Reading alumnus, Mark Oosterveen, did exactly that when he staged a production of Hamlet within the Grand Theft Auto video game world.
Mark, who graduated in 2003 from the University of Reading with a degree in English, film and drama, shared that this project was created from a fear of the future during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.
Mark is an actor, and prior to the pandemic he was mainly working in theatre and doing voiceover work, with the occasional film or TV acting role. It was a passion he’d discovered during his time at university. “It’s a bit of a cliché but my time at Reading was where I figured out what I wanted to do as a person, what I wanted to do for a living and what sort of person I was,” he explained.
“I immersed myself in English, film and theatre as well as the Drama Society. The University had a vibrant, artsy atmosphere, and I began to think more seriously about a career in that sphere.
“The Drama Society would put on Shakespeare productions every summer on the grass between the Students’ Union and the Library. It was always a big event. This is what really sparked my interest in Shakespeare, and gave me ideas about how to radically stage Shakespeare. I have many happy memories of these productions.”
A digital theatre
One day during the COVID-19 lockdown, Mark’s fellow actor friend – Sam Crane – had one of the most radical ideas about how to stage Shakespeare – within Grand Theft Auto (GTA). This spark of an idea led to Grand Theft Hamlet – a feature documentary film directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, which follows Sam and Mark as they attempt to produce a live virtual production of Shakespeare’s play in an entirely digital, and violent, environment.
Watch the trailer on MUBI:
Mark explained more about how Grand Theft Hamlet came to be. He said: “When we stumbled across an outdoor theatre in GTA we knew we’d struck gold. Sam and I flew as avatars around the vast GTA environment in a helicopter so we could scope out possible areas for staging a production.”
“Hamlet itself is four hours long, so we did have to cut it down quite brutally to a lean 90 minutes. There were some scenes that we literally couldn’t stage within GTA. Then we auditioned professional and non-professional actors, as well as virtual security guards to protect our characters during the productions.”
The need for security guards stemmed from the fact that GTA is an unpredictable world where anything can happen. Mark said:
“When we tried to rehearse scenes, we found we were constantly interrupted by players trying to shoot and kill us. We found this amusing, but it meant we needed to figure out a way to stage the play relatively uninterrupted.
“So we put contingency plans in place – if your character is killed in GTA then your character dies for 30 seconds and you respawn somewhere else on the map – so, we arranged for understudies to step in until the character came back. We also made additional contingency plans in case every character died.”
The production was live streamed on YouTube, with the recording being captured through director Pinny Grylls’ avatar filming on their virtual mobile phone. Pinny, Sam and Mark had to contend with differing sound quality due to people participating from around the world, however the video game medium also led to one huge benefit – accessibility. Mark said: “We were able to hard-code subtitles into every copy of the film which was a real benefit for inclusiveness and accessibility. This was particularly important to us as Pinny is a deaf filmmaker and we wanted the film to be accessible to all.”
The documentary film of the project premiered at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival where it won the Jury Award for best documentary feature. Mark reflected:
“It was a great experience. We’re not sure that anyone else has done anything like this before. We started it as something to do during lockdown and it’s snowballed into something much bigger!”
A pandemic movie
COVID-19 cast a shadow over many things during the height of the pandemic, and Mark is now able to take a step back from the project to see that the same happened to this production.
Mark said: “We didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back now I can see that this is actually a pandemic movie. We don’t mention COVID-19, pandemic or lockdown during the production, and we certainly didn’t intend it to be a film about the pandemic.
“But it’s there indirectly, in the background, influencing the production.
“This documentary has provided a window into life back then and shows a glimpse of our lockdown history, helping us to remember what life was like during this time.
“It also emphasises how the lockdowns destroyed people’s work and social interactions. This project helped me massively during the pandemic and watching the documentary back now, it’s become a sort of therapy to relive those days.”
Grand Theft Hamlet is streaming exclusively on MUBI from 21 February.
