Is this a typically botched photo from my phone or is it the world being smothered by a dark cloud of evil?

I maintain it's the latter since I snapped it while watching In Search of Vanished Blood, a video presentation on the walls of the National Gallery of Scotland late on Monday night that was part of the Lights Out commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

The video was accompanied by a soundtrack of whining shells, air raid sirens and exploding armaments rivalled briefly by the Tattoo fireworks until not long after it started there was a very loud bang and all went dark.

I hung about for a bit but had had enough by 11 so don't know whether they got the show back on the road or not.

There was blood, albeit in the shape of red fairy dust, on show in the Grads production of The Duchess of Malfi that I saw earlier in the evening.

Now I know this play is regarded as a Jacobean masterpiece but frankly I think it's a load of cobblers not redeemed by poetic language as can be fairly claimed for some of Shakespeare's more nonsensical work.  So that tends to colour my view of any production including this one.

In the director's notes she says that she sees the play as a Hammer horror movie and with blood and gore splattered over the screen, wolves howling in the moonlight, madmen stumbling along the dimly lit corridors of Transylvanian castles to the sound of clanking chains and distant screams the show has a chance.  But not, for me at any rate, in the well lit and comfortable auditorium of the Royal Scots Club.

More to my taste was the other Grads show on view at the same venue this week.  The Wonderful World of Dissocia presents itself initially as a gleefully anarchic and absurdist romp, beautifully lit and energetically performed by a team of actors on top of their game. 

The sting comes in the second act. Fortunately the lights went down before I had properly read the programme because the director's note on the play gives away what to my mind should be the shock of realising what it's all about.  So if you go, and I thoroughly recommend that you should, don't read the programme until afterwards.

For tickets https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/duchess-of-malfi and https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/wonderful-world-of-dissocia