It is a perfect way to end a fringe day. Julian Fox is stage-door keeper at the Barbican in London. Last year he found modest Edinburgh success in a show called the Slacker's Opera. This year he occupies the tiny Pleasance Cellar for a mere half-hour, from midnight, to showcase a slight but mysteriously beautiful cabaret in which he shares fragments of journal entries, songs and fantasies that articulate something intimate about the life of a small man adrift in a big, bombastic world.
It helps that Fox himself is short and balding, and that we know he works in a job that the limelight shuns. He plays, without affectation, on the banality of his own existence. When he dreams himself a pop star, schmoozing with Kylie, the image toys with the concept of celebrity. His songs are purposefully unlyrical: "I can't wait until tomorrow/ I am going to see American Psycho," he drones, as if Billy Bragg and the Pet Shop Boys were sharing tranquillisers. He describes how hearing a CD at Tower Records' listening post gave him "a moment of feeling in sync with current trends". He dances with an Action Man, exits at the tail of a matchbox-sized aeroplane.
This show is far too modest to hype, but there is nevertheless something ineffable and haunting about it. This is a Diary of a Nobody for our globalised age.
Until August 27. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
