Hugh Hughes loves to talk. “I talk for hours and hours and I just don’t stop. I just did some work in New York and really enjoyed the place and my mother thinks it’s because New York and I are similar in that we both have the ability to stop, but if given the chance we’ll just continue”. From where I’m sitting, New York is the last place I would compare to the gentle and thoroughly engaging Welshman sitting opposite me.

The man who “until two years ago was a budding photographer, narrating slideshows in Abergavenny”, seems the antithesis of the stereotypically hard bitten cynics that seem to populate New York. He has an infectious excitement and childlike quality to him, which I suggest may be the key to his appeal. “People always say that. Even my mother says to me ‘when are you going to grow up?’ But I am grown up”.

In 2005 Hugh “had never done anything like theatre before”. Considering this, he’s been a remarkable success. His 2006 sell-out show, Floating, about the Isle of Anglesey floating away, has gone global. “It’s mad really. I went to New York which was amazing and then the Barbican and in the autumn we had a couple of 700-seater venues”. That’s no mean feat for a man who, along with his accompanying musician, “the amazingly talented” Aled Jones, admits to finding the Edinburgh Festival – where we first met him – “pretty massive and intimidating at times”. But it is his newer show Story of a Rabbit, which opened at last year’s Edinburgh Festival and which will appear at the Brighton Festival this year, that we are really interested in at the moment. This is a piece which “tries to look at death and dying in an uplifting manner”. The inspiration was “my father dying about six years ago, it was a very difficult experience but doing the show has really helped”.

“I wanted to really look at death and everything that surrounds it and I suddenly remembered this time in 1995 when I was looking after a neighbour’s rabbit, which died while I was in charge of it. It was terrible really when I think about it. I had to put it in a bin liner so my friend could bury it for the kids on her return, but when she got back it had disappeared. To this day I’ve still got no idea what happened and I haven’t forgotten it”.

A part of me wants to laugh but it isn’t at the ridiculous misfortune of the incident, it’s more at the wide-eyed and puppy-dog-tailed way Hugh tells it. That’s the charming thing about him; his tales are so engrossing and earnestly told that you find yourself with a permanent Cheshire cat grin and constantly on the brink of laughter. Seemingly oblivious to this effect he has on people, Hugh claims to “never quite know why people laugh, my friends tell me not to worry about it and to just get on with the show”.

Hugh has been working on an exhibition called Snowdonia is Not Like New York. In a similar style to his theatre work, it’s a real multimedia experience. Hugh seems to draw heavily on his background in photography and has a keen eye for a beautiful image. “I’m fascinated with beached whales, always have been. I used to travel all over the UK to photograph them. Me and my friends would dress up in suits and process gifts to the whale and then take great photographs”. Hugh has a certain affinity with whales because he “needs to swim every few days or else he feels dried up”. I’m left with this image as Hugh departs and I can’t help appreciating the irony of a man plucked from slideshows in Wales to take New York and Edinburgh, and now Brighton, by storm, hating the feeling of being a fish out of water

Brighton Dome Pavilion Theatre, 20–24 May, times vary, £12.50, bfpp 7