There's no unlikelier stand-up star than Julian Fox. A cult attraction at the Edinburgh fringe, Fox now brings his offbeat cabaret act back home - to the Barbican, where he works four shifts a week on stage door. The passivity of his day job is an inextricable factor in Fox's appeal. His audaciously uneventful diary of a nobody treads delicately on the right side of self-parody, as if he is daring us to deny that it is all absolutely true.
In his new show, Fox dips into his journals (penned in naff Athena stationery) to recount the everyday tales of his low-key life. There is the story of how Fox was made redundant by the Royal Shakespeare Company then recruited by their ex-hosts the Barbican, without ever having to leave his desk. On the RSC's last night in the theatre, he waits in the wings to be invited on stage for a grand farewell. But he waits in vain.
He interrupts his deadpan diary readings with voiceovers itemising the competing attractions of major cafe chains. His earnestness is hilarious. But it is poignant, too - consumer culture has colonised his imagination.
But Fox's triumph - and the show's - is that his humanity defies the blandness of the modern world. He finds wonderment in the trivial and the manufactured. He films himself visiting London's Docklands, in sunglasses, as if it were Miami Beach. He sings artless songs to electronica soundtracks of seemingly impossible showbiz ambitions. And yet there he is, on stage, against the odds.
Of course it is a sleight of hand. Fox's naivety is partly an act. But he plays it disarmingly straight. The show is never camp; the slightest archness would destroy it. It succeeds because we are prepared to accept these songs, dances and humdrum reflections as insights into Fox's life; to accept that he (and we) really can be this banal. The occasional suggestion of contrivance jars like a betrayal. We feel for this bewildered, trivial and triumphant character as we feel for ourselves.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
