Sam Adams in Slate:
Sam Crane was in the middle of doing Macbeth when the bullets started flying. A veteran of the British stage, Crane was on the verge of playing the lead in the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child when COVID-19 shut down live performances, and by the U.K.’s third lockdown, he was itching for an audience. So instead of playing to a West End crowd, he found himself orating to a smattering of heavily armed lawbreakers inside the video game Grand Theft Auto. “If I could just request that you refrain from killing each other,” he calls out amid the tomorrows and tomorrows. “And don’t kill the actors either!”
The death-defying soliloquy is part of Grand Theft Hamlet, a poignant and deeply hilarious documentary that chronicles the attempt of Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen to stage a full-fledged Shakespeare production inside the world of Grand Theft Auto. Co-directed by Crane and his partner, Pinny Grylls, the result plays like a cross between Waiting for Guffman and a YouTube playthrough, multiplying the challenges of no-budget theater by the chaos of online interaction. Potential actors pop in and out without warning, or grow bored and simply start shooting. Not even the Globe’s audience was quite so unruly.
More here.