AS PART of the ongoing transformation of the Scottish capital into a Christmas theme park for tourists, Edinburgh Castle is undergoing the dubious honour of digital illumination a la Buckingham Palace, Diamond Jubilee era.

The city is making a blatant spectacle of itself, shining lights in our eyes while it lifts £20 notes from our pockets. In consigning us to the role of infantilised spectator, I’d steeled myself for yet another exercise in socially disengaged pseudo-Scottish self-branding, calculated with the cold cynicism of an RBS advert. Not quite, though.

With no live element other than security, we are simply treated to lights on cold stone walls and a spectacle laced with self-parody. Walter Scott, the true muse of this kind of thing, was introduced wryly as the original spin doctor, responsible for the great 19th-century fake of Scottish ceremonial tradition — an admission surprising in its honesty.

In one courtyard is an exceedingly lifelike statue of Earl Haig in full military pomp on horseback. It’s the real thing and behind him on the old hospital building are projected grainy film images of men marching to the front.

The juxtaposition is shocking. Haig himself seems to be leading them and then, almost hopelessly, an invisible hand attempts to sketch the men’s faces. It fails and rubs itself out before trying again. And again. A woman’s voice observes that the returning soldiers “make ghouls of themselves.”

It’s not often you see a statue subverted in that way and you feel like throwing red paint over the butcher’s face and hands. Nor is it often that the story of the castle is told in terms that parody its very purpose and the voice makes the wish explicitly “to put an end to war.”

Have Remembrance Day poppies and poetry become such a cliche that they can be appropriated for the purposes of tourism? I’m not so sure and it was still shocking to witness overt pacifism written so large in that militaristic place. The creators deserve credit for their daring.

After that I began to enjoy the novelty of being on the castle at night, where a pencil-thin laser touched Calton Hill from Castle Rock, neon trees conjure an interactive deconstructed Tchaikovsky dub and the regal folk legend Dolina MacLennan steps forward, 30-feet tall, proclaiming: “Let the festivities begin.”

Under a perfect full moon, in the freezing Edinburgh night, I almost wanted to believe.

Runs until December 22, box office: edinburghcastle.scot