After a long wait due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hamlet has arrived in Uruguay. This time, the classic by William Shakespeare landed renewed with a "very Latin American and modern" staging by Argentine director Marcelo Díaz.

"It is a work of suspense, of politics... I think that is what the spectator is going to find: a kind of theatrical Netflix," said Diaz in an interview with EFE.

The premiere of the play will take place on Jan. 8 at the Teatro El Galpón in Montevideo.

The director “modernizes” and finely links Shakespeare's classic story with what he considers to be a Latin American problem: the relationship between power and the media. For Díaz, it would be "a nonsense" to leave the play stuck in its original time period, when Shakespeare "modernized things."

"Here there is no more than a coup d'état, this was a coup d'état. The new king killed the other king, installed himself in power and the party that Hamlet leads, with his friendly people, is in opposition, in resistance. And this is very Latin American, it has to do with our history," says Diaz. 

For the director, the story has a parallel with Latin American history, and his play is an updated version of an important and current work, which, for Diaz, can attract a young audience, accustomed to consuming other types of entertainment.

"I think we do a disservice to theater when we treat it like a museum piece. Shakespeare is wonderful because it makes us aware that, deep down, we are still the same, the world did not change as noticeably as we think, because otherwise these plays could not be so current," says Diaz.

Despite the increase in the number of infections from the Omicron variant, the premiere of the play is still on.