Working in collaboration with Arts Active Trust, Hijinx and the Royal Opera House, we have started a long-term project working with people in Butetown and South Cardiff to explore the creative and expressive potential of opera as storytelling in music across the community.

Initiated by the commission of a new opera based on Nadifa Mohamed’s novel The Fortune Men, which explores the horrific miscarriage of justice inflicted on Mahmood Hussein Mattan in Tiger Bay in the 1950s, we are running a series of projects and community conversations to build a creative link between the opera and the community whose story it is.

Work began in January 2024 with a Reading Room project led by a group of local young people, reading and responding to Nadifa Mohamed’s award-winning book and opening up a wider discussion. The Reading Room project will lead to further creative work, to be led and developed locally with our support, and will include developing a conversation with the creative team leading on the new opera.

As part of our work in Butetown, MTW will be running our Future Directions project for neurotypical and neurodivergent, learning disabled and autistic people aged 16 to 25 from September 2025 to July 2026. For details about Future Directions see here.