This year’s Edinburgh international festival will explore gender politics, racism, masculinity and homophobia in a response to political challenges around the world.

The festival’s director, Fergus Linehan, said many theatre and opera productions in this year’s programme were an artistic response to contemporary questions and tensions, including environmentalism through Tibetan mythology, women’s rights in Nigeria, and the upsurge in authoritarian populist leaders.

“There is this sense out there of artists going: ‘We can’t just wallow around in the joyful aesthetic of all of this – that is fiddling while Rome burns,’” Linehan said.

“It’s not quite polemic or agitprop in its nature, but there is a sort of definite sense of testimonial, and narrative out there, which is I think about trying not to go mad in the world at the moment.”

That darker tone will be dramatically offset by the festival’s free opening concert on 2 August, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra will perform classic and modern Hollywood movie scores at Tynecastle football stadium in west Edinburgh, including music from Star Wars and Harry Potter.

Pitched as a family-friendly concert, timed for early evening, Linehan said this year’s event, conducted by the LA Phil’s director, Gustavo Dudamel, expands on his longer-term project to broaden the festival’s reach and appeal.

Gustavo Dudamel will conduct a family-friendly concert. Photograph: APA-PictureDesk GmbH/Rex/Shutterstock

Tynecastle is the home ground for Heart of Midlothian FC, one of Edinburgh’s rival football teams. The festival’s previous free opening events have been staged at places such as Edinburgh castle and the Usher concert hall, at night.

Last year’s collaboration with the Leith theatre in the city’s east end had greatly increased its local audience, he said, countering the festival’s aura of elitism. A fifth of the 15,000 tickets for the Tynecastle concert would be given to local residents and community groups.

The festival, he said, “is a really broad celebration which has to appeal to all sorts of people and have moments and points of reference for a completely different [audience].

“It’s interesting to do something with a sports club because the dynamic of sports clubs and cultural institutions is very similar in a lot of ways – we have this fan base who let us know what they think. You’ve got to be able to work with the core fan base but at the same time you’ve got to be able to have wider conversations.”

This year’s programme features the international festival’s normal repertoire of formal classical concerts, including a residency by the LA Phil, with concerts by the BBC Symphony orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Mark Elder and Donald Runnicles, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting the Royal Scottish national orchestra performing Götterdämmerung, the conclusion to Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

However, this year’s festival puts heavy emphasis on its contemporary theatrical productions. England’s National Theatre and David Hare will reboot Ibsen’s classic Peer Gynt into a modern Peter Gynt, restaging it as a “provocative, raucous” production set in Scotland, with an epic running time of three hours and 45 minutes.

La Reprise, seen at the Avignon festival, investigates a brutal homophobic murder. Photograph: Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Han

One of China’s only independent dance companies, Yang Liping’s Peacock contemporary dance company is presenting a reworking of Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring with Tibetan and Chinese mythology exploring rebirth and humanity’s interconnectedness with the natural world.

Oedipus, Sophocles’ ancient Greek hero, becomes a modern populistic leader guilty of the “most repugnant of transgressions” who is on the brink of election to power in a production by Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam and Robert Icke. A Belgian production, Milo Rau’s La Reprise, investigates the brutal homophobic murder of a young man abducted in Liège.

From Australia, Sydney theatre company perform The Secret River, the dramatisation of the novel of the same name by Kate Grenville which investigates the mistrust between people through the eyes of an English colonist and Aboriginal residents of Australia.

Nigerian gender politics and female solidarity is investigated by 10 prominent women artists from across the country’s ethnic groups in Hear Word!, while Faso Danse Théâtre’s Kalakuta Republic celebrates the attempts byradical Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti to create an autonomous community in Lagos, only for it to be razed to the ground by the army.

Linehan said much of this year’s programme was designed to broaden the festival’s repertoire away from white, northern hemisphere work, with other strands designed to appeal to younger adults wwith different preoccupations to traditional festival audiences.

He said he supported proposals for a £2 a night tourist bed tax in the city, to help fund city infrastructure and facilities. The proposal is being investigated by Scottish government ministers but resisted by hoteliers, who claim their industry is already heavily taxed.

“People in Edinburgh have been painted as being anti-festival; people just want the festivals to be managed in a way which isn’t as intrusive,” Linehan said.

“If the festivals can become better and serve the people of the city better and create more of a legacy through this, I think that it will create a virtuous circle; there’s a tension being created which shouldn’t be created.,” he said.