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Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Staging Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7837 Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When live performance shut down 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, a sprawling, open-world video game best known for fast cars, chaotic and often criminal missions, and player-driven mayhem. 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. 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

0:07.0

I'm Farah Karim Cooper, the Folger Director.

0:11.0

In the video game series, Grand Theft Auto, you play a criminal in fictionalized versions of real cities.

0:20.0

So typically, you do criminal things,

0:22.6

like stealing cars, beating people up, or smuggling drugs.

0:28.6

But Grant Theft Auto is an open-world game,

0:32.6

which means you could choose to do any of those things,

0:35.6

or something completely different.

0:38.5

You could drive around town all day listening to the radio.

0:42.6

Or you could put on a play.

0:45.4

Which is exactly what the actor Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen chose to do during the pandemic.

0:51.7

Sam's partner, filmmaker Penny Grillsills decided to turn their quest to stage

0:56.1

Hamlet inside the game into a documentary. The resulting film, Grand Theft Hamlet, has all

1:03.9

the backstage drama of putting on a play in the real world, except they're performing

1:09.2

for an audience full of heavily armed trigger-happy gamers.

1:14.1

Here are Penny Grills and my friend Sam Crane in conversation with Barbara Bogue.

1:21.2

Before we get into the real story, I think you guys better explain how this game works.

1:26.7

So, Sam, you were the Grand Theft Auto addict, at least in the beginning.

1:30.8

So why don't you do the honors for us?

1:32.5

Okay, so Grand Theft also, it's what they call an open world game.

1:37.9

So it's basically a kind of recreation of Los Angeles.

1:43.5

The city that the game is set in is called Los Santos, which is like

...

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