If one thing is certain about uncertain times, it’s that people will still try to create art. And it was in the midst of the boredom and artistic desperation induced by Covid-19 lockdown that Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls, and Mark Oosterveen came up with the idea to stage a production of Hamlet inside the virtual cityscape of Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto Online.

GTA Online is something of a perfect conduit for what Crane and company attempt to create. After all, the subtext of Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player campaign is the idea of men trying to divine meaning from what they do and what still needs doing. That campaign also represents another level down of Rockstar’s meta-creative reckoning with the monsters they’ve unleashed. That side of GTA 5 has since been utterly eclipsed by its lawless online counterpart, which made an already popular game into...