Daniel Kitson and Panti head to Edinburgh as part of the Traverse's festival lineup

Yasmin Sulaiman
7 June 2016

This article is from 2016.

Daniel Kitson and Panti head to Edinburgh as part of the Traverse's festival programme

Rob Drummond's In Fidelity comes to the Traverse in August / credit: Rebecca Pitt

Plus there's new work Mark Thomas, Julia Taudevin and Rob Drummond

A night before the official Fringe programme launch, Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre has revealed its festival roster for 2016. This year, the Trav will put on 15 shows in August – four Scottish premieres, 10 world premieres and one European premiere.

Love is a big theme in this year's programme: Rob Drummond (Bullet Catch, Quiz Show) returns to the theatre with In Fidelity, a TED-talk style show that marks his 15-year relationship with his wife. The Traverse Theatre Company presents Milk, a new play by Scottish actor Ross Dunsmore, about three couples who are in their 90s, 30s and teenage years. And the true life-inspired Daffodils (A Play with Songs) tells a heartbreaking love story, and is soundtracked by a live band.

Daffodils isn't the only Trav show to boast live music – fab Glasgow two-piece Tuff Love will perform as part of Julia Taudevin's feminist gig-theatre piece Blow Off. The RSC presents another women-centred work in the programme, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., in which Alice Birch looks at the forces and pressures that shape women in the 21st century.

Panti – the self-proclaimed Queen of Ireland – comes to town too, with High Heels in Low Places, and Scotland's Adura Onashile brings us Expensive Shit, a story about a Nigerian toilet attendant in Glasgow.

Daniel Kitson follows up last year's excellent Polyphony with Mouse – the Persistence of an Unlikely Thought, and will likely be the first of the lineup to sell out. And comedian-activist Mark Thomas (who was at the Traverse with Cuckooed in 2014) premieres The Red Shed, to mark the 15-year anniversary of his first gigs in Labour Club The Red Shed in Wakefield.

Look out too for Downton Abbey / Mr Selfridge actor Cal MacAninch in My Eyes Went Dark; poetic storytelling from Matt Regan in Greater Belfast; and Al Smith's adaptation of Gogol's Diary of a Madman, which is from the same team behind the acclaimed Grounded and The Christians.

Plus, Breakfast Plays present four new technology-inspired works by Trav associate artists, and Village Pub Theatre livens up Monday mornings, when the Traverse is traditionally closed.

Tickets are on sale from 10am, Wed 8 Jun. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs Fri 5–Mon 29 Aug and the full programme is announced on Wed 8 Jun.