‘Hamlet’ performed in ‘Grand Theft Auto’

In the 400 years since its publication, Hamlet has been performed on ships, in prisons, on the New York subway — and now, inside a video game. After COVID closed UK theaters, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen decided to stage Shakespeare’s tragedy in the anarchic world of Grand Theft Auto, where one risk was that a player could try to kill the (fictional) performers.

While the video game’s setting of San Andreas may seem a far cry from the Elizabethan stage, the director of a documentary about the project, Grand Theft Hamlet, begged to differ. “The Globe would have been noisy and smelly, people would have thrown apples… There would have probably been somebody arrested, there would have been prostitutes — literally like Grand Theft Auto.”