I was told the managing director wanted a Superwoman which worried me Yet when I met Tony he

I was told the managing director wanted a Superwoman, which worried me Yet when I met Tony he wasn't boss-like at all. He was most interested to learn if I was "a people person", but we bonded immediately over a shared love of animals I have three chinchillas and three cats. I liked to watch the tests happening, flexes being shaken 10,000 times to make sure that they didn't break, teddy bears' eyes being pulled out and burnt to check their child-safety levels But I really wanted a job I could be more involved in So I began looking for work in an area I understood. Sovereign fun, as I'm sure royalty would agree.To 13 Nov, 0171-930 8800).

My previous PA role was at the British Standards Institution where new products, from plugs to windows, are tested before they're allowed on to the market. Routledge's stone-faced Bracknell works some hilarious variations on this trick, as she perfectly paces the dowager's mounting horror at the gradual disclosure of Jack's unacceptable origins. This involves clamping the eyelids shut and averting the cheek, as if struck, in a majestically martyred manner that suggests a soul too refined for the sordid traffic of the world. Her forte is for what middle-aged fans of Coronation Street will recognise as the "Annie Walker gambit". Godley has a smart line in understated physical comedy - little sudden gestures, such as his seizing a croquet mallet, like some would-be dashing duellist, when confronted with Algernon's treachery in the country - which deliciously emphasise his hapless ineffectuality.So upholstered that she resembles a piece of overstuffed mobile furniture, Patricia Routledge is a rather subdued but generally persuasive Lady Bracknell.

In the great genteel bitching-contest with Cecily, Wickham is given a real run for her money by the splendid Rebecca Johnson who, in her engaging show of girlish sugariness, is every bit as sweet as strychnine. The young men - Alan Cox's pert, puppyish Algernon playing beautifully off Adam Godley's very funny Jack, who is like some leggy lugubrious waterbird - are a match for the female pair. From the moment she enters with an indomitable glint in her eye and the announcement that she intends "to develop in many directions", Saskia Wickham's wittily redoubtable Gwendolen lets you see that Jack is underestimating badly when he wonders whether this heavenly creature may, "in about 150 years", become like Lady B, her mother. She'll have completed the transformation and exceeded her in a year, tops.Attired in an outfit drolly reminiscent of the armour-plated maternal style, this Gwendolen surveys Jack's manor-house garden with lemon-flower smiles and lethal disapproval, as though nature constituted an unforgivable social solecism, and she thinks nothing of skewering roses with the tip of a disdainful parasol. It's a refreshingly "straight" account of this incomparable comedy. The subversive subtext is allowed to gleam through the poised, dextrous delivery of Wilde's artificial wit, instead of being "outed" and dumped on the stage in the shape of ostentatiously decadent trappings like the hookahs and oriental cushions that perved up Algernon's flat in one version or by the reinvention of Lady Bracknell as a drag turn. It's also a production in which youth scampers away with the honours.