How do you stage a Shakespeare play in the midst of a worldwide pandemic? British actor Sam Crane wasn’t positive, however he knew he was bored with Zoom screens. His willpower to discover a artistic outlet with out falling prey to soulless pandemic tropes led him to mount his personal manufacturing of “Hamlet” throughout the sprawling digital world of “Grand Theft Auto On-line” — a really totally different sort of display.
His artistic course of — from casting actors whose faces he by no means noticed to having his avatar shot by web strangers throughout rehearsals — is the topic of “Grand Theft Hamlet,” a documentary he co-directed together with his accomplice Pinny Grylls. Shot fully throughout the online game, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is a portrait of artists struggling to stability their craft with their private life in making an attempt occasions. The movie received the Documentary Jury Award at SXSW 2024, and can obtain a theatrical launch from MUBI in January 2025.
In an interview with IndieWire, Grylls and Crane mirrored on the distinctive expertise of making an attempt to conduct non-public rehearsals inside a public recreation.
“It’s as difficult as it could have been when Shakespeare was placing on a brand new manufacturing on the Globe,” Grylls mentioned. “He didn’t know if folks had been gonna like his new play ‘Romeo & Juliet’ or ‘Hamlet.’ Individuals would in all probability come alongside and be promoting apples, and if folks didn’t like [the actors] they’d throw them at them. And that’s form of the place we had been at. These guys didn’t care, they hadn’t paid $100 for a ticket. In the event that they thought we had been shit, they had been simply gonna stroll off or shoot us or toss stuff at us. And I appreciated that, as a result of it was the last word take a look at.”
“Grand Theft Hamlet” obtained largely optimistic evaluations from critics, with IndieWire’s David Ehrlich writing that “few pandemic movies have higher expressed the desperation to attach with a world full of people that may say ‘you might be bitch’ and shoot you within the face everytime you attempt to attain out. In truth, I’d argue that none of them have.”
MUBI will launch “Grand Theft Hamlet” in theaters on Friday, January 17. Watch the trailer beneath.