The population of Saudi Arabia is about 10 million, 37% of whom live in the cities. Birth control is discouraged because of cultural and religious beliefs and the average size of the family unit is six people. Islam is the religion of the state and it is the source of its civil and criminal legislative systems. As a divine law it cannot be revoked in most instances.

A strike involving nursing staff prior to the 1948 National Health Service Act was almost an unheard of event. In 1922 nurses at Saxondale, an 800 bedded mental hospital at Radcliffe-on-Trent near Nottingham, staged what was termed a “sit in strike” lasting four days for refusing to work a 66 hour week and accept a wage reduction as ordered by the employing authority.

That art is an expression of man's attempts to understand himself and his environment is as important as the purely aesthetic qualities of the piece, whatever it may be. Opera, together with the other performing arts, literature and painting, cannot simply be seen as pure entertainment. It is also a reflection of the society in which the composer and librettist lived, and the issues and values contemporary to those people. Opera with its fusion of words, music and theatre is able to delineate those issues involved and present them with an emotional intensity possibly unequalled elsewhere in art. Musical imagery is used to portray and develop the characters in opera by inflecting the librettist's words and embedding them in a sound world. This is how we can gain access to those characters' thoughts and emotions. As psycho-dramas the works of the late 19th and the 20th centuries reach the greatest level of complexity.