Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical, The Beautiful Game, will leave the West End on September 1, having lost almost £3 million during its year long run.

But the award-winning composer is looking ahead to his next show. "All I do know is that I want to continue writing," said Lloyd Webber, whose mammoth hits include Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. Lloyd Webber, 53, said it was a difficult decision to close his latest show, a particularly ambitious project set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland's "troubles."

Although The Beautiful Game was that rare Lloyd Webber entry to win a London Critics' Circle Award as best musical, Canadian director Robert Carsen's production at the Cambridge Theatre was shut out of the Olivier Awards and never caught fire with the public. In recent weeks, the musical about a Belfast soccer team comprised of both Catholics and Protestants had been playing to only 45 percent capacity in a 1,250-seat house.

"If you had asked me at the beginning of the year, `What did I think?' I would have said quite frankly that we've got another couple of years here," said the composer-producer, whose shows usually run several seasons or more in London before landing on Broadway for equally long runs.

But the book has not been closed on The Beautiful Game. A Canadian première is planned for the autumn of 2002 in Toronto, followed by a U.S. tour of five or six cities, excluding New York. Whatever the popular appetite for the show, which features a book and lyrics by comedian Ben Elton, Lloyd Webber said he was pleased to have done it. "The point is, this piece isn't really about the Irish problem but about the futility of these conflicts the world over and how they keep repeating themselves," he said.