ACTOR Louis Dempsey is quick to acknowledge that the next few months are going to be something special.

Louis is part of the cast of the award-winning drama The Weir which comes to the Lowry, Salford Quays, next week - the first stop on the second leg of a UK tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the play.

Written by Conor McPherson, The Weir won the Laurence Olivier Award for best play in the West End and it has also been performed on Broadway.

“We’d done the show for four months and had a month off Christmas and now we’ve come back to it,” said Louis.

“Every one of us in the cast has realised that with every show you are digging and digging and discovering something new.

“With some shows you arrive at a point where you are getting this fantastic audience reaction and people go ‘well I think we are there with this’ but with this show that’s definitely not the case.

“You think you’ve mined everything and then suddenly there’s a whole seam that you’ve not touched which then changes everything you have done before. That’s the kind of play this is.”

Set in a pub in rural Ireland, the locals gather and start to tell stories; an evening of light banter turns into something much darker.

“It is a very simple premise,” said Louis. “It’s just a few people meeting in a pub. A new girl arrives in the neighbourhood and she’s meeting the locals and getting to know them. That’s pretty much what happens on the surface.

“There is some brilliant dialogue, but as Sam Beckett says it’s what’s going on in between the lines that interests the audience and this play a great example of that.”

Louis said that audiences leave the theatre with diverse opinions about what they have just seen with the producers often receiving lengthy emails from theatregoers offering their interpretations of the play and its characters.

“A good friend of mine came up with the idea of the car park moment test,” said Louis. “If, when you go to a play and by time you get to the car you have started talking about it, then as an actor you have done a good job.

“If people leave and just go ‘that was nice, what’s for dinner?’ then I don’t think the production has registered with them.

“There’s no danger of that happening with The Weir. I think people are still discussing it long after they have got home.”

Louis puts that success down to the quality of the script.

“Conor McPherson does it all for you,” he said. “We have Q&As after the show and one of the questions we always get is ‘are any of you improvising?’. That’s a wonderful, backhanded comment. There isn’t a single breath in this play that’s improvised; it is all scripted, it’s all there.

“As an actor, you dream of something like that. It gives you the freedom to inhabit the character. You have freedom within a very tight framework. Like any really good writer, he expects his actors to work really hard.”

The Weir, the Lowry, Salford Quays, Tuesday, January 23 to Saturday, January 27. Details from 0843 208 6005 or www.thelowry.com