Mixed reports prevailed as London's busiest month in years wound to a close with two of its most eagerly awaited shows - the latest productions from Sam Mendes and Andrew Lloyd Webber - opening back-to-back at theaters seconds away from each other. Both drew a divided response.

And while the press night pair had elements in common, not least Cameron Mackintosh in attendance at each, the shows filter very different conflicts through equally divergent lenses.

"To the Green Fields Beyond," Mendes' first theater directing effort since nabbing an Oscar for "American Beauty," is a gentle piece set among a British tank corps during the First World War.

Lloyd Webber's grimmest musical since "Jesus Christ Superstar .. .. The Beautiful Game" examines a sectarian schism that continues today - the Troubles in Northern Ireland. One result is a topical immediacy that doesn't apply to, say, "Cats" or "Starlight Express," both of which are still running in London. ("The Beautiful Game" brings to five Lloyd Webber's current West End total.)

In the end, the week's premieres met with a comparable range of response to some of the earlier openings in an astonishingly busy month: new ventures from Yasmina Reza ("Conversations After a Burial"), Matthew Bourne ("The Car Man") and David Hare ("My Zinc Bed"), among them.

Among September's major attractions, only Trevor Nunn's Royal National Theater "The Cherry Orchard" elicited nearunanimous raves (for a dissenting view on page 34; "Beautiful Game," "To the Green Fields Beyond" both reviewed on page 19), although there were across-the-board accolades for Simon Russell Beale's Hamlet - if not always for John Caird's staging of the play.

There were some sharply contrasting responses to "Green Fields" following its Sept. 25 bow, after 11 days of previews, at the Donmar Warehouse. Mendes has been a.d. at the 251-seat theater since 1992.

Mendes had put aside talk of directing Samantha Morton in "Twelfth Night" in order to tackle the (nearly) all-male world premiere, an intermis- sionless study in fragile wartime psyches on the eve of battle - and death. That meant throwing its barely known author, 37-year-old Nick Whitby - whose last play was 13 years ago into the spotlight.

"Tanks for the memory, Sam. Play it again." The Guardian's Michael Billington awarded the show four stars out of five: "The evening reminds us why Mendes really is a great director."

A more cautious note was sounded by the Evening Standard's Nicholas de Jongh. He cited "a modest piece that stretches neither Mendes nor us ... as acted by a virtuoso team."

Name performers amid the 11-person ensemble include rising film actor Dougray Scott ("Mission: Impossible 2," Michael Apted's forthcoming "Enigma") and Ray Winstone, the popular British star of "Nil by Mouth" and the imminent "Sexy Beast."

The cast was not enough for the Independent's Paul Taylor: "The actors lend their distinction to a play that does not deserve it. One hopes that Mendes chooses his next film project more discerningly."

Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph found the evening "a first-class production of a manipulative and derivative play."

As of Sept. 28, the production had virtually gone clean for its limited run through Nov. 25, with a few seats remaining for some Thursday matinees. It's a dead cert to pay back a capitalization of £152,719 ($220,000), a figure encompassing pre-production costs through to the not-for-profit venue's paper clips.

As for its future? The Sunday reviews in the British press Oct. 1 will matter. Not an obstacle, apparently, is Mendes' upcoming commitment to his sophomore film, "The Road to Perdition": The director intends to do pre- and post-production on the Tom Hanks starrer in London.

"I think there's a life for the play," says Donmar exec producer Caro Newling. "It's a question of what form that life will take."

There's nothing, of course, to stop the play being reconfigured at a later date - either for a West End transfer or for New York or both, as "The Real Thing" last season was before it. The Tom Stoppard revival had a four-month layoff between the Donmar and the West End . After that, it travelled directly to Broadway and won three Tony Awards.

As it happens, Sir Tom was among the Cambridge Theater first-nighters Sept. 26 for "The Beautiful Game." The £2,950,000 ($4.3 million) musical marks a collaborative first between Lloyd Webber and English standup comedian, filmmaker and dramatist Ben Elton, unknown in the U.S. but a household name in Britain.

Elton, 41, is the latest in a long procession of Lloyd Webber book writers and lyricists (predecessors Tim Rice and Don Black were present on opening night), though hardly the first to endure some hard-hitting reviews.

"The lyrics make Rice look like Cole Porter," wrote the Telegraph's Spencer, adding that Elton "can't seem to spot a cliche without rushing to embrace it."

Chimed the Times' Nightingale: "Elton doesn't always seem aware of the line between the simple and the clunky."

Critics found more unified favor with Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard's "hardedged exuberant synthesis of the respective drills of football and ballet" (the Independent) and with "the superb-voiced Josie Walker" (the Express), the musical's little-known leading lady. Walker inherits for the final curtain the clearly designated hit single from the show, "Our Kind of Love," that gets sung by a different woman in the first act.

Meanwhile, Tankard is just one of an offstage creative team that received little advance press but considerable industry interest. That includes a Canadian director-designer duo, Robert Carsen and Michael Levine, steeped in opera but scarcely experienced in the commercial musical. The lighting designer, Jean Kalman, works regularly with Peter Brook.

A flatout rave - "a brave, engaging, and heartfelt musical" - came from the Mail's Coveney in a review that will matter to the mainstream audience that any Lloyd Webber show must court. The composer's biographer, Coveney had also extolled the 1998 Lloyd Webber West End entry "Whistle Down the Wind," which was otherwise mostly junked. Lloyd Webber told Variety Sept. 28 that the reviews had been "a little bit pique-y," adding, "they've been pretty good for me."

Even better, he said, was interest from North America, with Lloyd Webber reporting three major producers jostling to pick up a show that would be a natural in, say, Boston.

Initial biz has been encouraging. The day after the reviews, the box office took around $105,000, with the total advance to date at $2.1 million, roughly one-third of which consists of reservations.

The marketing office of the Really Useful Theater, Lloyd Webber's company, estimated that the week's wrap for "The Beautiful Game" would fall just shy of the $400,000 mark.