Tales of the City: A captive audience (and cast)

"Doing anything on Saturday evening?" my friend asked. "Would you and your consort like to join us in... prison?" "Let me guess," I said. "Prison is a fashionable new steak restaurant in Notting Hill, with lots of bars and a signature dish involving porridge?"

"No," he said. "Prison as in warders, screws, crims, cons, bird, solitary, parole... We're going to see Guys and Dolls in Wormwood Scrubs, performed by a cast of maximum-security prisoners. It's a red-hot ticket among theatre-going folk."

Gosh, the anticipation. I'd never been inside a prison in my life. But I'd seen The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile and I felt I knew the Scrubs and its prevailing atmospherics already. But Guys and Dolls done by lifers? What quartet of tattooed and hairy-armed recidivists would dress up in fishnets and bustiers to impersonate the Hot Box Girls singing "Take Back Your Mink"? Which bewildered snout baron, his armed-robber days behind him, would be dragooned intro playing Miss Adelaide, the eternal fiancée with the psychosomatic flu?

We drove across London, scrutinising the instructions leaflet thoughtfully provided for prison-visit virgins. It warned against bringing into the prison any mobile phones, drugs, alcohol, firearms, food or files (inside cakes or otherwise), and advised about the dress code. "Oh my God, I'm wearing stilettos," wailed my consort. Inside, the prison officers are full of joshing and barked orders, and the thick security window is alarmingly full of pock-marks, as if recently peppered with buckshot. We moved in a subdued little group across the misty courtyard, past chapels full of stained glass and incarceration wings made of umpteen million bricks. It was not unlike walking through an Oxford college, but with an additional dread that you may never get out again.

The show was inside the church hall. I'd completely misunderstood the nature of the production. The Dolls were played by real girls, from Kensington and Chelsea College, and the lead roles by professionals. Only Runyon's rackety crapshooters – Harry the Horse, Angie the Ox, Vinnie the Voice, Liver Lips Louie et al – were played by convicts. And believe me, you couldn't take your eyes off them.

What do you expect murderers to look like? And arsonists, kidnappers, rapists or serial GBH exponents? Whatever fatuous stereotypes were in my head (think Ronnie Kray, Frankie Fraser, Al Pacino in Scarface, or Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs) nothing prepared me for the reality. There were 18 of them, half black, half white, mostly young and mostly small (a tiny, impassive Oriental with a cheroot vied with a 4ft 10in punk in a goatee for the role of Smallest Criminal in London), most of them cowed and nervous as first-year schoolboys, happier doing the rhubarbing crowd banter than speaking lines; one or two of them cockily stepped out of character and played to the gallery – the chap playing General Cartwright of the Salvation Army did his entire role as an Elvis impression.

But how could I not sit there wondering what they'd each done to warrant a life sentence (minimum 12 years)? That guy with the spats, who never looked anyone in the eye – I had him down as a child molester. The super-confident black dude playing Big Julie from Chicago – obviously, a crack entrepreneur. But by the time they were twirling the chairs and singing the descant parts of "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat", I'd stopped treating the evening like a Bedlam freak show, stopped trying to spot an arsonist behind the airy charm of Benny Southstreet, ceased attempting to identify a serial hitman in the features of the guys singing "Luck be a Lady Tonight", and started to enjoy myself.

It's all the brainchild of Pimlico Opera and its energetic and charming CEO, Wasfi Kani, who has been staging operas and musicals in prisons for a dozen years. The first time they did The Marriage of Figaro in collaboration with the Scrubs D Wing lifers, it was called "the coup de theatre of 1991" by no less than The Times. Ms Kani grew up beside the Scrubs, read music at Oxford, and decided to combine the two strands of her life in her early thirties.

Hers is probably the most imaginative take on prisoner rehabilitation that I've ever comes across. I can't get out of my head the memory of the ovation that greeted the last note of Saturday's show, nor of the posh, public-schoolboy lifer (What was he in for? Fraud? Drugs? Cheating at polo?) who told the audience, "Thank you luvvies, darlings, sweeties. Before this we were all tough, hardened criminals – what have you done to us?" Nor can I forget the presentation of a home-made poster from the D-Wing desperadoes, which read, "Thank you, Pimlico – You set us Free".

Changed utterly: the despoiling of Yeats's view

I'm in two minds about the news from Ireland that a county council may grant planning permission to a farmer who wants to build a bungalow next door to WB Yeats's inspirational tower in Ballylee, Co Galway. Yeats loved the view of meadow that greeted his gaze from the battlements, and couldn't bear to think of his sacred view being despoilt by farming-cottages.

But Yeats was a crashing, 24-carat snob, whose visionary sense of landscape seemed to him of far greater importance than a fellow mortal's desire (or need) to build a house to live in. The land is owned by the farmer, not by Yeats's family, and logic dictates he should be able to do what he wants with it, even build one of those rancho de luxe bungalows that have turned western Ireland into a simulacrum of Patagonia. It is, objectors say, an "appalling intrusion".

Despite his irritating folie de grandeur, Yeats wrote some of his finest poems – in The Tower – in Ballylee. He liked to surround himself with the trappings of simplicity ("No table or chair or stool not simple enough/ For shepherd lads in Galilee"), which he thought connected him to the heroic past. He prayed that he "may handle nothing and set eyes on nothing/ But what the great and passionate have used/ Throughout so many varying centuries." Positively the last thing he'd have wanted in his sightline is a prefabricated home called Dunswiggin, with a Vauxhall Astra in the carport and an Eminem CD on the hi-fi.

But have the development's critics thought their objections through? If town-planners were more respectful of poetry, nothing would ever get done. Progress would take a back seat to prosody. The view from Westminster Bridge, as seen by Wordsworth ("Earth hath not anything to show more fair") would have stayed the same for 200 years, and we wouldn't have the Lloyds Building, Canary Wharf or the London Eye. Fans of Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" would have long ago demanded the rerouting of the Heathrow flight path so as not to have their reveries disturbed by the roar of 747s. One can, surely, take the preservation of somebody's view a bit too far.

I'm not pointing the finger, but size does matter

I'm a little wearied by all the recent advice in the newspapers about flirting, social leakage, indications of fertility, what women really mean when they tilt their heads at 30 degrees or bat their eyelashes, and what the different sexes are looking for in the behaviour patterns of the young and single. According to one survey, the length of men's fingers is very important – men whose ring fingers are longer than their index fingers are likely to be more fertile, healthy and appealing to ladies. Like every man who read this news story, I instantly checked my own digits – and yes, that ol' ring finger's got the advantage by at least an inch. Elsewhere I read that women's favourite signals of availability or desire are "intense eye contact, mirroring their male counterparts' movements and tossing their hair". I can do signals just as well as any woman – and for 48 hours, whenever I met an attractive woman, I extended my ring finger in her direction with a meaningful look on my face. Bafflingly, this did not secure any reciprocated expressions of interest. And yes, thanks for asking, they say the swelling around both my eyes should calm down in a week or two.