POSTCARDS FROM LONDON

Walk into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s house in the opulent Belgravia district of London, and you stumble upon one of the best private art collections in Europe. The Victorian-era pre-Raphaelites are his passion, and a huge tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones adorns an entire wall of his ground-floor living room, which also contains several paintings by the same artist and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

A glass elevator ascends to a light, airy fourth-floor drawing room, where Lloyd Webber proudly shows off a new acquisition--a portrait by Rossetti of William Morris’ wife, Janey. In a neat touch, the rugs in this room are original William Morrises.

“I can’t be blase about it,” he says of his collection. “It’s a sheer delight to me.” It is also an indication of Lloyd Webber’s immense wealth (recently estimated at about $600 million). Of his eight stage musicals to date, the two mega-hits “Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” have accumulated grosses in billions of dollars.

In terms of popular acclaim, his is the modern musical composer’s career to which all others aspire. Yet despite his wealth and success, there has been a suspicion that Lloyd Webber, 52, has gone through a lean patch creatively. His last musicals, “Sunset Boulevard” and “Whistle Down the Wind,” have done creditable business, but failed to ignite public enthusiasm in the manner of his earlier hits. And when “Cats” closed on Broadway this month after an astonishing 17-year run, it felt as if a line was being drawn at the end of an era.

While Lloyd Webber defends his recent work, he concedes he has been ready for a new direction: “I’d never done anything completely original. All my shows have been based on stories or at least a character or work that already existed. So I decided to shake things up a bit.”

He has certainly done that. His new musical, “The Beautiful Game,” which opens Tuesday in London, is a radical departure from his other work in several respects.

Most apparent is in his choice of collaborators: Ben Elton, who wrote its book and lyrics, has no previous experience in stage musicals. Best known in Britain as a stand-up comic, Elton has written novels, two West End plays (including the successful “Popcorn”) and the British film “Maybe Baby.” Canadian Robert Carsen, who directs “The Beautiful Game,” has a lustrous reputation on the international opera circuit and a handful of straight stage productions to his name. But he, too, is new to musicals. So is Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard, a soloist with Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre.

The bleak theme of “The Beautiful Game” also marks a change of direction for Lloyd Webber. With a cast of young unknowns, the musical is set in 1969 and tells the fictional story of a group of teenagers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who play for an outstanding local soccer team. Their lives, and those of their girlfriends, are torn apart by the onset of sectarian violence and bigotry. One young character is shot in the kneecaps.

Then there’s the fact that this is Lloyd Webber’s first real book musical--until now, all his shows have been sung through. But “Beautiful Game” has plenty of spoken dialogue by Elton that is comic and poignant.

It is also more sparse and low-key than Lloyd Webber’s extravagant mega-hits. ‘It’s pretty simple,” he says. “It’ll look as if it’s playing against the back wall of the stage. What it’s not is a spectacular musical in any shape or form. There are no huge sets or lavish costumes. It’s pretty earthy.”

Nor does it depend on jaw-dropping theatrical moments involving chandeliers or helicopters: “There’s a riot, a car that catches fire. And that’s about it.” This is a relatively low-budget production. “We expect change from 3 million pounds [$4.2 million],” Lloyd Webber says. Compare that with the 10 million pounds ($14 million) to stage “The Lion King” in London last year.

Even the music in “The Beautiful Game” confounds expectations. Lloyd Webber plays a tape of the Celtic-inflected overture, which is dark, percussive and full of foreboding: One could listen a long time before guessing it was his work. And the show’s title song sounds more like a soccer fans’ chant than a musical melody.

Setting a Musical in a War Zone

The idea was hatched late in 1998, when Lloyd Webber, Elton and their wives had dinner together. “I didn’t know Andrew at all,” Elton recalls, “but since I was 9, musicals have been my love and obsession. So I’d seen most of Andrew’s shows--and I have his greatest hits album, which I’m prepared to admit proudly. But over dinner Andrew said he wasn’t going to do any new musicals. He seemed a bit down about the whole prospect.”

Instead Lloyd Webber asked Elton to consider writing fresh dialogue and maybe a new song for the aging “Starlight Express.”

“I’d never seen it, so I went along,” Elton says. “It’s my least favorite of Andrew’s shows. It’s not for me. So I wrote to him saying I couldn’t see what I could contribute to a musical that had run for 18 years. But, and this was the cheeky bit, I said if he was interested in a new, contemporary piece, that would be great.”

“When Ben said that, it was music to my ears,” Lloyd Webber says. “He was a breath of fresh air. I’d been wondering what was happening to the musical. No new writers had come on to the scene and stayed since Tim [Rice] and me. So suddenly I thought it was high time we took on an awkward subject of our own time.

“It happened that I’d seen a BBC-TV documentary about a bunch of boys playing soccer in Northern Ireland. I thought, what if we made them older and followed the conflict in their adult lives? I sent Ben a video. Five days later, he sent me a 40-page synopsis.”

“I wanted to write about people’s lives,” Elton says. “So here are these kids on the threshold of life, whose lives are corrupted by the fact they live in a war zone. Their soccer team gave me the structure for the story, the loyalties and betrayals. We don’t take sides. I don’t have solutions. But the show doesn’t shirk the politics. It’s a Catholic team, though there’s a lad from the other side. One boy joins the IRA. One republican becomes alienated from them. It ain’t ‘The Sound of Music,’ that’s for sure.”

Much has been made in Britain about the fact that Lloyd Webber and Elton are not the most obvious bedfellows. In terms of their public personas and political pronouncements, the two men are poles apart. Lord Lloyd Webber, peer of the realm, beloved of polite middle England society and multimillionaire art collector, is widely proclaimed an arch-conservative. Elton, motor-mouthed and thrillingly rude, made his name in the 1980s as a stand-up comic with left-of-center attitudes; he was the self-appointed scourge of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Yet the implausible friendship between the Tory peer and the firebrand radical comic seems genuine. “Andrew’s an extremely easy guy to hang out with,” Elton says.

Lloyd Webber’s New Crew a Dream Team

For his part, Lloyd Webber seems energized not only by Elton but his other new collaborators, notably Robert Carsen. “This is the first time I’ve worked with a director who can read music,” he says. “I normally present the score, and they’ll say ‘yes, absolutely.’ Robert frowns and says, ‘What’s this bit doing here?’ ”

As for Meryl Tankard, he recalls: “I saw her at Sadler’s Wells [theater], noticed that she seemed to be into athletic choreography, and thought she might be able to help our dancers do something soccerish and macho. We needed to see if it was possible to stage a soccer match on stage.”

His new partnerships, implausible on the surface, are already proving enduring. Elton has been assigned to write the screenplay for the long-awaited film of “Phantom of the Opera” and has already completed a first draft. And when “Phantom” plays La Scala in Milan, Italy, in 2003, it will be under Carsen’s direction.

His collaborators are not the only reason there seems to be a new spring in Lloyd Webber’s step. He pulled off a significant coup at the start of this year when he bought the 10 leading West End theaters in the Stoll Moss group, beating out Max Weitzenhoffer, an Oklahoma oil tycoon.

Lloyd Webber has been trying to play down advance expectations of “The Beautiful Game.” “The odds of something being another ‘Phantom,’ ‘Cats’ or ‘Miserables’ is extremely unlikely,” he muses. “It was a unique cluster.”

“When ‘Aspects of Love’ closed after four years, people thought it was a disaster. Yet it was a little chamber musical, and it ran longer in London than the first run of ‘Oklahoma!’ Once these musicals become entrenched, there’s no stopping them. I keep thinking “Starlight Express” has to go, and it never does. It keeps going.”

“The Beautiful Game” opens at the Cambridge Theatre, one of the venues he now owns--and the new musical is now occupying most of his thoughts. “I’ve had a great time working on it,” he says earnestly. “I have no idea if it will be a commercial success. But we’ve still done it for all the right reasons. It’s an original piece of work. It doesn’t interest me any more to do a Disney musical or cartoon. I don’t ever want to do anything now that isn’t about breaking ground.”