FIO Theatre is a Cardiff ‘company of outsiders’, led by artistic director Mathilde López and making theatre from stories Welsh stages have never told. In 2026 it had two very different productions, big ambitions and a team of one. We ran the campaigns for both, and each needed to reach people who had never set foot in a theatre.

The Trial of Dhegdeer was a colab with Music Theatre Wales and the community in one of Cardiff’s most diverse boroughs, Grangetown. The challenge was to reach Music Theatre Wales’ traditional opera audience and still attract the new audiences that FIO were hunting. The bak team took inspiration from the aesthetics of the Grangetown streets, from community fliers, takeaway menus and supermarket product lists, bringing the visual language of the streets to the theatre.

Before the poster was printed, 29 people across Grangetown and Butetown chose the image in a street-level focus group campaign that in itself gave the community a measure of ownership of the production.

Provocations gave six theatre-makers a provocation each, and we gave the campaign one of its own: No script is safe. In ten days we built a separate voice and plan for each of four audiences, including the Dhegdheer crowd, and handed FIO’s team a week-by-week plan they could run themselves. Nearly 300 people came to the four performances, and the final night sold out with a diverse audience packed with decision-makers, including The Arts Council of Wales.