Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet was one of the big cult hits of the 2024 festival circuit. Produced in the UK during one of the multiple COVID-derived lockdowns, it documented an attempt to rehearse and stage a production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a virtual environment. The venue for both play and documentary was Rockstar’s phenomenally popular Grand Theft Auto Online.

On the one hand it is easy to recognise why the film was a success. It tackles the social isolation and emotional difficulties of the global lockdowns in an interesting fashion. It has an easy-to-understand and unique sort of pitch to its audience. It also capitalises – in fact, absolutely zeroes in – on the general absurd appeal of the Grand Theft Auto videogame franchise. Nowhere else in live performance is a rehearsal likely to be disrupted by a violent shoot-out, or a performance delayed because the audience all fell off a dirigible to their deaths. The silliness of the game environment rubs off on the film.

There are many Youtube video shorts of funny things happening during Grand Theft Auto games, and the best parts of Grand Theft Hamlet prove about as funny as they are. The brevity of the video shorts add an important advantage. Two minutes of improbably mayhem inside a videogame can be kind of funny. Almost 90 minutes of it approaches being interminable.

The somewhat gentrified presentation of the work – a feature-length documentary – lends everything a rather self-satisfied and pretentious air. It is true that there are moments of unexpected beauty, or striking intellect, but they are widely dispersed among the otherwise tedious action. Ever sat and watched someone else play a videogame? Now imagine watching someone not even properly play the game. There is also an unshakable sense that much of the film is nowhere near as spontaneously staged as it purports to be.

They always say that you should never watch films about things in which you are an expert: a medieval historian is never going to appreciate films set during the Middle Ages, because while a mass audience is busy marvelling at the sword fight the historian is too hung up over the characters’ outfits being 200 years ahead of their time. Now I am absolutely not claiming to be any kind of authority on using Internet-based technology to present live performance in virtual environments, but I did spent two years studying the idea intensely in the early 2000s for a PhD I never completed.

It is my sorry task to note that Grand Theft Hamlet‘s central claim – that it documents the first-ever performance of its kind – is simply not true. I could not with any certainty claim what was the first, but certainly the earliest I have ever read about was Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis’ Desktop Theater production of Beckett’s Waiting for God inside a multi-user dimension (MUD – ask a nerdy uncle) in 1997. Being beaten to the punch is not necessarily a kiss of death for a project like this, but missing the boat by a quarter century suggests a lack of intellectual rigour. The 1997 effort also proved a better example of the way interactive environments could change live performance, when a spectator left a chat room, renamed themselves Godot, and returned to announce their arrival. It remains the only production on record where Godot turned up.

There is nothing like that in Grand Theft Hamlet: just a moderately funny idea played out at length to mild applause. It feels tedious twice over: first by the film itself, and secondly by the hype.