Last time Derren Brown visited Brighton he forced a group of pensioners to steal chips from unsuspecting diners on the seafront.

Brown wanted to teach his protégés the art of misdirection for a one-off stunt which aired on Channel 4 called The Great Art Robbery. To prepare the pensioners for nabbing a £100,000 Chapman Brothers’ work from an exhibition put together by the former chairman of the ICA, Brown made the would-be robbers pilfer watches on King’s Road before they were made to tag their names on a Brighton wall.

Shortly after the four silver-haired graffiti artists began to paint, the police arrived and tossed the over-65s into a van to test their mettle. But the set-up backfired when one of the group had a panic attack.

Brown, however, says his stunts rarely go wrong. “They always seem to go according to plan. In fact, we would have extended that one. The idea was they would get driven around in the police van and think they were going to get taken off to a prison cell but we had to cut that one short because Tony was starting to panic.

“That is the only thing I can really remember that went a bit wrong, but it hardly went wrong. It just got cut short.”

For Apocalypse, another Channel 4 show, Brown convinced Steven Brosnan the world had ended after a meteorite shower had crashed into the Earth and had left only a few survivors infected with a zombie-like virus.

The aim was to make Brosnan appreciate his life by experiencing loss of the biggest scale.

“With something like The Apocalypse – which is a lot darker and the guy is going through a lot more than being put in a police van – there are always medical people watching. “You plot the experience of the person step to step just to make sure it’s never going to get too much for them, and The Great Art Robbery was a much lighter show.”

Both highlighted Brown’s mastery at turning mind magic into engrossing entertainment and the debate about whether he is mind-reader or magician (or even a man blessed with powers) never fails to titillate – even after years of television and stage shows. They also show how he’s shifted emphasis from showmanship to more personal work.

Now, he says, it is characters, or “real hero stories”, journeying from A to B and learning something along the way.

“Much of magic cannot be talked about so magicians have to put on a persona to create interest but then it starts to seem pretentious. “Classic magic has no drama, it is what a God does, and there is no struggle, so it is a whimsical trick.” The fuel for The Great Art Robbery was seeing his parents ageing.

“We don’t stop being interesting because we turn 65.”

He’s interested in what makes people happy, “what you can do to have a better life experience while walking round in the brief time we have”.

So although a lot of what he does are fun tricks for entertainment, there is, at heart, a genuine love for the strange grey matter in our heads. “There is nothing more interesting to us as human beings than ourselves. We all find ourselves as individuals richly interesting. “When we see things in other people perhaps one of the reasons why we find them so interesting is we know it is also a part of us.”

He prefers the stage to TV. It has its feet more firmly planted in magic and conjuring.

“It is more difficult to pull off – and is always going to give you more.”

Following his Olivier Award- winning Svengali show is Infamous, which is an adventure into that world inside our heads.

There is a personal touch: he tackles his nerdish upbringing as the son of his school’s swimming coach and how being pals with the classical music lot got him the nickname d***brain. Then there was his coming out, aged 31.

“It’s about understanding what is going on in people’s heads – apprehending the world of the other is the way I see it. “That covers all sorts of things. It is what a psychoanalyst will do but it is also what a magician does – whether that is putting someone through an experience like Apocalypse or working with an audience with a show rooted in magic.”

The question he’s always asked is, is it real?

“It’s real in that it is a real experience for someone. It’s not real in the sense that anything supernatural is happening. It’s a word that describes what goes on in someone’s head, so every moment of the show is about that.”

  • Derren Brown, Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, Tuesday, February 11, to Saturday, February 15
     
  • Starts 7.30pm, tickets £39.90, Call 0844 8717615.