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

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.