Non-diegetic spaces in games, places existing outside the narrative, offer sets to stage player-created storytelling way outside what is normally implicit in videogames. Nestled in the hills of Grand Theft Auto V (2013)’s affluent Vinewood neighborhood is an amphitheater modeled after the Hollywood Bowl, a stage that projects to dozens of rows of empty seats. Normally the Vinewood Bowl is a dormant and slightly hidden-away area in the spaces of GTA Online but during the COVID-19 lockdown, the space sparked an idea for two out of work London actors: what if they created a pantomime of The Bard’s Macbeth (1623), and documented the process of performing the violent, psychologically tormented play within the confines of a world that is even more violent, Rockstar Games’ satirical projection of America that is Grand Theft Auto.
Grand Theft Hamlet is not so much a recording of the play therein but is more of a technical account of what it looks like to stage a play in a game world where the default is anonymous violence, hijacking is literally the name of the game, and the population of the game world is made up of equal parts sincere criminal role-players and toxic trolls.
It makes for a fun and funny production, generally, as friends Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen try to convince online players to take roles in their play and have a series of encounters, some which seem organic and some which seem staged, that express something more about the possibilities of what we bring to a game space and what it allows us to create within in.
It doesn’t go off without a hitch. The means of interaction in the Grand Theft Auto game world is primarily of violence. This works, for certain sequences within Macbeth but then there is not really enough mechanical versatility in the game to do some acting. It’s amusing, for sure, watching players pace from one end of the stage to the other, using basic emotes to fill in their expressions, and often ending their scenes in unintended bloodbaths, but it’s just one trick, and it’s really the main one the film has.
We can then reflect, as an overall meditation, about what Grand Theft Hamlet means for the kind of machinima — cinematic productions staged with videogame graphics and mechanics — we are enabled to make within non-diegetic game spaces.
It’s a novel thing and like Alien on Stage (2020), the joy of it is in the unusual opportunity to pantomime a serious work in a space typically regarded as unserious. There’s this point of levity, though, when the cast all file onto a hot air balloon and go drifting over the suburbs of Los Santos, where we realize there is a beauty in this connection, as they rise, as high as the game’s cloud-ceiling allows, having elevated this game space into a stage for some experimental art. In that moment, you get that peaceful feeling of floating that comes with creating something outside the box, and Grand Theft Hamlet shows us what a sweet opportunity this was for its creators.