In a lecture of 1818, on the subject of “village“Samuel Taylor Coleridge had this to say:
Coleridge was particularly vocal about the prince’s eccentric state after he meets his father’s ghost—”wild and round words,” in Horatio’s view. Far from being unlikely, this wild whirlpool is, as Coleridge points out with typically practical shrewdness, “a kind of sly bravado, bordering on flights of delirium.” No less what we should not expect, in short, from someone who was inexplicably scary.
If you fancy a new dose of Grotesquerie, and more technical jargon than you can shake a stick at, I recommend “Grand Theft Hamlet.” This is a newly released movie, and it’s a documentary, but it’s just a movie. Think of it more as a crucible in which solid forms from film, theater, and video games were stirred until they melted. It has its origins, as do many of the strange cultural blemishes we have come to appreciate, in the years Coronavirus disease-19.
Action begins with inaction. At the beginning of 2021, two British friends, Sam Crean and Mark Oosterveen, are stuck up. They are both actors, without action; The UK is in lockdown, and London’s theaters are closed, as they were at times before the plague in Shakespeare’s day. Mark competes with the unit. Sam is married, with a family. The two players meet in the only space where they can roam freely – online. Like millions of other aimless souls, with itchy thumbs and time weighing on their hands, they find themselves playing Grand Theft Auto. Within the game, in the fictional city of Los Santos, it takes place in an amphitheater, and the, largely not-quite-comic, thought occurs. Why doesn’t “Hamlet” go? inside GTA world?
The film was directed by Sam Crane and his wife, Penny Grylls, and depicts Sam and Mark’s efforts to film, and perform, a production of the play. Not once, apart from the end credits, does it give us a glimpse into life beyond the confines of the game, although we do hear a lot of chatter from people coming. When I saw Hamlet’s Great Robbery, in a movie theater, every exchange was subtitled; Grylls, a documentarian by trade, is also, in her own words, “a proud member of the deaf community,” and the experience of seeing the translation shift without warning from everyday speech, rich in impertinence, to Shakespeare’s Timeworn passages. Very attractive feeling of verbal collage. You need to go back to Grigori Kozintsev’s great 1963 film of “Hamlet,” where Shakespeare’s words were transcribed into subtitles while the characters were performed in Russian (a translation for the stage by Boris Pasternak), to feel a jolt of shock.
The climax of the film is a performance of “Hamlet” that takes place in Grand Theft Auto Online on July 4, 2022. All we get, unsurprisingly, are some gags, which last less than fifteen minutes; In fact, the show lasted for four hours or so. (This is actually the unacceptable “Hamlet” length. Consider a bladder test Kenneth Branagh The version that was released in theaters in 1996.) The rest of the movie is occupied with tests, rams, surprise communications, and a ridiculous number of helicopters, which the good GTA folk seem to frankly use like you or I protecting a taxi. The finest moment comes when one of the participants, Dipo, who was tagged by Sam and Mark for the role of the prince, lands in a helicopter, announcing a scrap from Act II, Scene 2: “I’m late—but I know it. I know it. I don’t—” and then, instead of… Adding the next phrase, “I’ve lost all mine,” Wells runs a grenade into the helicopter, which explodes. Everyone watching explodes into destruction-loving boats. He regained his inheritance.
Dipo plays under Sleep de geo From Dollah101, he’s one of a slew of characters who, either out of curiosity or because they feel mired in a climax-like slump, pivot in response to Sam and Mark’s open casting call. We are delighted to meet ParteBmosmir, a green-eyed foreigner, unmistakably proud of his role, and who, instead of reciting Shakespeare, takes Sam and Mark with a heartbeat from the Qur’an. Others entertain us with excerpts from “Julius Caesar” and “Othello.” There’s also an estimated DJPHIL-chest, top hat, financed shorts, and shades. She, not he, introduces herself (“I’m a literary agent, my mother, and I love ‘Hamlet'”), explains that she temporarily assumes the avatar of her nephew, and by establishing her credentials, is launched into The Prince’s Self-Dichotomy of Act V, Scene 2 , before the duel: “If Hamlet is of himself, he does not sin, and when he is not of himself he sins not, / Then Hamlet does, for Hamlet denies that”.
It is a complex and unusual test piece, not one of the most obvious hits in the play, and whether by chance or design, a perfect fit for the matter at hand. Getting away from yourself, after all, is the raison d’être of GTA’s GTER and other enthusiast pastimes of that number. The actress is both neither and not Devil, and she caps the ambiguity by skipping a few lines to the command Hamlet issues to Usyk: “Give us the chips. Come in.” Accordingly, she draws a brown gun, and Laertes—currently embodied by Sam—is slaughtered in cold virtual blood, and nearly dies. You can’t blame her.
To some extent, “Grand Theft Hamlet” picks up where Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) left off. The sight of Djphil coming out of a gun, rather than a foil, immediately reminded me of the scene of Gonzo at a gas station in the Luhrmann film, when the irony of Benvolio’s line “Up But Up Your Swords” is swept aside by the manufacturer’s mark on the gun — “Sword 9mm Series S.” ” But Crane and Grylls are, I suspect, on to something more than the hype of clever historical updating. Think of the moral environment of GTA, where cruelty is laughable and where malice, more often than not, stems from the finest and most fleeting of motives and leaves no lasting trace. May it soon be that we are likely to come into the mood of the mob, in the theaters and other pits of Revelry, in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England? We may have been mystified by the public who delighted in the taste of bears. But what would Shakespeare’s contemporaries make of us as we sat before a little window, in the warmth of our homes, and watched doll-like people blow each other in the head?
Whether Sam and Mark picked the right play, on the other hand, I’m not sure. In a way, it’s the obvious choice; If you’ve heard of Shakespeare, you’ve heard of “Hamlet.” And certainly there is a revivalist kick in the vision of To Be or Not to Be, tried out against different backdrops: first on a high rock next to a heavy sea (1948), and then, at the end, next to a fire on the roof of a casino. Thus, the demented prince was rebooted as a spoiled gentleman, agilely jumping through the flames for something. If I had to choose the most accurate guide to GTA, I would fill in with the retrospective words of Horatio, who, surrounded by corpses as the play ends, tells Fortinbras and the English ambassadors exactly what they missed. The speech isn’t included in “Grand Theft Hamlet,” which is a shame, because it looks exactly like a trailer for the game:
Elizabethan audiences, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, instinctively took Horatio’s words as a kind of confirmation, reassuring them that what they had just witnessed was a tragedy of revenge. “Hamlet” represents the pinnacle of the genre and also a deepening, hitherto unimagined, of its possibilities. It’s not a spoiler for “Grand Theft Hamlet” to say that such depths are beyond its scope. What it resembles most, to my eyes and ears, are the vengeful tragedies that preceded and succeeded “Hamlet”—the treacherous rapids that led up to and after it. Take Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which was staged sixteen times at the Rose Theater in 1592 and 1593, and which also features a ghost, a fit of madness, and a play within the play. Or imaginary intensity.”White devil“John Webster plunges into illicit passions and evil intent, carried out at first (without much success) at the Red Bull, in London, in the dark winter of 1612. Listen to Flamino, one of the many villains, apparently whitewashing the heroine, Vittoria And her maid, Zanesh, to calm him down:
