Grand Theft Hamlet

Lockdown played havoc with so many lives, but professionally none more so than those in the entertainment industry. With theatres and cinemas all closed, their livelihoods dried up and a serious degree of ennui crept in to their day to day lives. One escape from that was "Grand Theft Auto" and that's where we meet jobbing actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen. Two forty-somethings who were dealing with this situation by shooting as many folks as they could online. The former lives with Pinny and has a couple of kids, the latter lives on his own and is struggling to find some sort of motivation. It's whilst playing the game one day that they find an outdoor auditorium and hit on the idea of performing "Hamlet" there. Swiftly they realise that...

A weird little time capsule movie for a weird time in history, when a global pandemic forced us into lockdown and for some, this became an opportunity to create.

Going into this, I thought I'd be seeing something much more different than the end product, and I couldn't help but feel a bit let down with the actual performance of the play. Felt like it was jumping around and just showing the highlights. Maybe that's for the best. But it is an interesting and ambitious idea, trying go crowd source a Shakespeare production with people playing characters in a digital world. Genuinely teared up at bits too.