PERSPECTIVE

Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment

ALEX SPENCER

Sam Crane stands on a beach in the rain, dressed rather unseasonably in a sleeveless vest, his head bisected by a pink streak of hair. “To be, or not to be,” he recites, into the tall waves, before his soliloquy is interrupted by a motorcycle pulling up. The vehicle and its rider are translucent spectres, the visual shorthand GTA Online uses to indicate a player in passive mode, unable to kill or be killed. It’s 2021, and Crane is an actor forced out of work by the pandemic, filling his days in lockdown as many of us did, by playing games online. In this stranger’s arrival, Crane sees the thing he craves most: an audience.

Before he can finish asking for feedback on the performance, though, the stranger speeds off, their bike’s ghostly wheels somehow leaving gouges in the sand. In the background you can hear the voice of Pinny Grylls, director of Grand Theft Hamlet and Crane’s wife, having presumably just walked in to find him playing the game. She bursts into cackling laughter: “He doesn’t care!” Crane takes this in the spirit of self-pity he was here in the rain to indulge. After all, the reason he’s practising Hamlet’s most famous speech is that he’s been nudged into the role by co-director Mark Oosterveen after the production’s lead actor dropped out. “They don’t care,” Crane laments. “No one cares…”