A Sunny Morning

1. His behaviour from the moment he enters. He grumbles that the people in the park are "idling their time away", demands a bench to himself, orders Juanito to "rout out" three priests who are sitting on "his" bench, and then walks straight through Dona Laura's pigeons, scattering the birds she is feeding. When she protests he answers, "What do I care about the birds?" and refuses even to speak to her because "we have not met". Her verdict is immediate: "What an ill-natured old man! Why must people get so fussy and cross when they reach a certain age?" She is also, of course, delighted when he fails to get the other bench — which shows she is quite as combative as he is.

2. Because each is ashamed of having grown old, and each wants to protect the other's memory of their youth. The two asides are almost identical in feeling. Gonzalo: "No, no, I will not reveal myself. I am grotesque now. Better that she recall the gallant horseman who passed daily beneath her window tossing flowers." Laura: "No, I am too sadly changed. It is better he should remember me as the black eyed girl tossing flowers as he passed among the roses in the garden." Their silence is therefore not deceit but consideration — each would rather be remembered beautifully than be recognised. A comic reason reinforces it: each has just invented a heroic death for the other's beloved, and confessing now would mean confessing the lie.

3. They begin to recognise each other when the conversation turns to Valencia and the villa Maricela. Gonzalo says he is a native of Valencia; Laura mentions a villa near the sea, hidden among lemon and orange trees, "Maricela" — and the stage direction reads "(Startled.) Maricela?" He then produces the name "Laura Llorente", and it is her turn to be startled: "(Startled.) Laura Llorente?" "They look at each other intently." From that exchange onwards both suspect, and by the end of the duel story both are certain, as their asides show — "This is Laura!" and "Gonzalo!"

4. Laura is certain during the retelling of the duel, when Gonzalo describes "my cousin" hiding in his house, escaping to Seville and then Madrid, and writing letters that were never answered. Her aside "Gonzalo!" comes even earlier, at the words "the gallant lover". But the final, acknowledged realisation comes at the very end, when she turns her head and sees him stooping, "trembling and with a great effort", to pick up the violets she has dropped, and says to herself, "Yes, it is he!" The sequence matters: she knows who he is quite early, but she knows he still loves her only in the last few seconds.

5. For three reasons. First, self-defence — each has to explain why the lovers never met again, and the truth is unflattering: he ran off to Paris with a ballet dancer within three months, and she married someone else within two years. Second, romance — having decided to keep the past beautiful, each decorates it, turning a shabby ending into a glorious death in Africa and a tragic drowning at sunset. Third, competition, which is where the comedy lies: Laura's aside "You will not get ahead of me in decorating my own funeral" shows that once he has told a splendid lie she is determined to tell a better one. Each privately sees through the other: "What an atrocious lie!" and "She lies worse than I do."

6. With deep and undiminished affection, mixed with amusement and a little sadness. They begin as enemies and end unable to bear parting: they agree to meet again tomorrow on the same bench, he promises to bring crumbs for her birds, and he tells her the morning "has been a great honour and a great pleasure." The feeling is proved by actions rather than statements — his painful stooping for the violets, her "(Sweetly.) Are you coming again tomorrow?" — and it is sealed when they quote the Campoamor lines to each other and smile "as if she were again at the window and he below in the rose garden."

7. Both are small objects that carry the whole movement of the play. The snuff ends the quarrel: he offers his box, she accepts, they sneeze three times each, and she says in an aside, "The snuff has made peace between us." It is the hinge of the play — without that shared courtesy the two would never have talked. The violets, brought by Petra from her guard, end the play: as Laura takes them a few fall, and Gonzalo stoops painfully to pick them up. That action reveals his feeling and brings about the final recognition. Together they show the Quinteros' method: feeling is conveyed through objects and gestures rather than declarations.

1. The flashback in A Sunny Morning is unusual: nothing is staged, no scene changes, and no character steps back in time. The past is delivered entirely through dialogue, and — this is the crucial point — through a disguise. Gonzalo speaks of "my cousin" and Laura of "my best friend", so that the two lovers narrate their own history while pretending it belongs to other people. The effects are several and all of them are dramatic rather than decorative.

It supplies the whole background without stopping the play. In three or four minutes the audience learns of the villa Maricela, the window with the red roses, the girl called "The Silver Maiden", the horseman who threw up a bouquet each morning and caught one each afternoon, the merchant her parents preferred, the insult beneath the window, and the duel at sunrise on the beach. All of it arrives as conversation between two strangers on a bench, so exposition and action are the same thing.

It becomes the recognition scene. Each detail one of them adds is also a clue to the other. "You seem to know the story well." "And so do you." The flashback is therefore not an interruption of the plot but the plot itself: the past is the mechanism by which the present is discovered.

It creates the play's central irony. Because the audience works out the truth before the characters admit it, every sentence of the flashback carries two meanings. When Laura says of her friend, "She was very unfortunate and had a sad love affair," and Gonzalo replies simply "Very sad," we are watching two people discuss their own tragedy with perfect politeness, which is both funny and painful.

It measures the distance travelled. Setting the black-eyed girl at the window and the gallant horseman among the roses beside the white-haired lady with a parasol and the gouty gentleman with a reading glass is what gives the comedy its undertow of sadness, and what makes both of them decide to stay silent.

And it sets up the ending. Because the audience has been shown the bouquet thrown up to the balcony, the final stage direction — they smile "as if she were again at the window and he below in the rose garden" — can restore the whole past in one image, and the violets Gonzalo stoops for are recognisably the same flowers fifty years later.

2. The play is a comedy that keeps turning into a love scene, and the two effects are produced by the same means.

The humour of character. Both old people are vain, quarrelsome and thoroughly enjoying themselves. Gonzalo demands a bench "to himself" in a public park, wants three priests "routed out", and then lectures Laura that "the benches here are public property" — an inconsistency she pounces on at once. He boasts about killing hares and partridges and about a wild boar's head in his study; she answers, "Yes, kill time. That is all you kill," and trumps him with a tiger's skin in her boudoir.

The humour of physical comedy. The "enormous pair of glasses" plus a reading glass, which make Laura say "I thought you were taking out a telescope"; the two of them sneezing three times each in alternation after the snuff; and the old man dragging his feet so that "a carriage would not raise more dust."

The humour of repartee. "Do you use your handkerchief as a shoe brush?" / "Why not?" / "Do you use a shoe brush as a handkerchief?" The dialogue works by reversal, each speaker turning the other's own words round — which is also how we learn that these two are perfectly matched.

Verbal irony is everywhere in the first half. Laura's "You are very polite" to a man who has just refused to listen to her; her delight when he loses the other bench too, "Serves him right for scaring the birds."

Dramatic irony governs the second half and gives the play its depth. The audience knows who these people are long before they say so, so ordinary lines acquire a double meaning: "The daughters of the mothers I once loved kiss me now as they would a graven image", read out as a joke by a man beside the woman he loved; "Very sad", said of his own ruined love affair; "Fate is curious. Here are you and I, complete strangers…" said by a woman who knows they are nothing of the kind. The two elaborate lies are the high point, because each character is simultaneously deceiving, being deceived, and privately seeing through the deception — "She lies worse than I do."

Situational irony frames the whole piece: a quarrel about scattered birds becomes a reunion of lovers, and two people who have spent fifty years apart, when finally given the chance to speak, agree to say nothing.

Finally, and most importantly, the humour is never cruel. The Quinteros laugh at old age — the gout, the spectacles, the boasting, the melodrama — while giving their two old people more dignity and more feeling than most young stage lovers have. That combination of laughter and tenderness is the play's real achievement, and it is why the ending can be funny and moving in the same breath.

3. The title is justified on at least four levels, and a good answer should climb from the literal to the symbolic.

Literally, it names the setting. The opening stage direction reads, "A sunny morning in a retired corner of a park in Madrid. Autumn." Dona Laura's first words are "I am so glad to be here… What a beautiful morning!" and Petra replies that the sun is hot. The entire action takes place on that one morning, in real time, in sunshine.

Structurally, the sunshine causes the plot. It is the sunny morning that brings both old people out of doors, fills the benches, leaves the three priests comfortably settled on the one Gonzalo wants, and so forces him to sit beside the only lady in the park. He says so himself: "The authorities should place more benches here for these sunny mornings. Well, I suppose I must resign myself and sit on the bench with the old lady." Without the sun there is no meeting.

Symbolically, the sun is the warmth that grows between them. The play begins cold — a scattering of birds, insults, "senile old lady" — and ends in a glow of affection. Set against autumn, the season of the play, the sunshine becomes an exact image of what the Quinteros are describing: brightness late in the year, beauty in the season of decline, a last warm day in two long lives.

In the plot's final moments, the phrase becomes the condition of their future. "Good-bye until tomorrow." "Until tomorrow." "If it is sunny." "A sunny morning." The words are repeated four times in nine lines, and by then they mean far more than weather: a sunny morning is now the name of their appointment, their renewed courtship, and their agreement to go on living in the present rather than in the past.

A final point worth making: the title is deliberately light. The play could have been called "The Silver Maiden" or "Twenty Years Pass", and either would have promised a tragedy. "A Sunny Morning" promises a pleasant hour — which is exactly the tone the brothers wanted, and exactly the disguise under which they smuggle in a story about lost love.

4. Was it wise? There are two defensible answers, and the best response weighs both.

The case that they were right to keep silent is the one the play itself endorses. Each explains the decision in terms of the other's happiness: "Better that she recall the gallant horseman"; "It is better he should remember me as the black eyed girl tossing flowers." A confession would have forced two exposures at once — the ruin that age has made of both of them, and the shabby truth about the separation (a marriage two years later, a ballet dancer in Paris within three months). Silence keeps the memory intact and lets a friendship begin without the weight of an old grievance. It also preserves the play's delicacy: what they have agreed to is more intimate than a confession, because each knows, each knows the other knows, and neither needs to say it.

The case that they were wrong is also real. They are seventy, and they have already lost fifty years to a set of intercepted letters and a misunderstanding. An open confession would have allowed them the honest companionship of whatever time remains, instead of a friendship built on two large lies. And lies are inconvenient: if they meet daily, Gonzalo must keep a dead cousin dead and Laura must keep a drowned friend drowned.

On balance, the decision looks wise in the moment and unsustainable in the long run — which is precisely why the play ends where it does.

What will happen tomorrow? A reasonable prediction, grounded in the text:

He will come, and he will bring the crumbs he promised — his own version of the bouquets he once threw to her balcony. They will sit on the same bench, and the quarrelling will continue, but as a game. Neither will make a formal confession straight away; instead the truth will keep leaking out in the same way it did on the first morning — through a remembered name, a line of Campoamor, another slip. Since each now knows that the other knows, the pretence will become a shared joke rather than a defence, and the "cousin" and the "friend" may well go on being discussed for weeks, with both of them enjoying it.

In the end I think the fiction will simply be allowed to fade rather than be broken: they will become inseparable companions of the park bench, and the words "Laura" and "Gonzalo" will be spoken aloud one day without any scene at all. What the play makes certain is the important part — that the two of them have found each other again, and that neither intends to be alone tomorrow.

5. Summary. On a sunny autumn morning in a quiet corner of a park in Madrid, Dona Laura, a refined white-haired lady of about seventy, arrives on the arm of her young maid Petra and settles on what she calls "my seat". She sends Petra off to meet the park guard she is in love with, and amuses herself by throwing bread crumbs to the pigeons, naming them as she feeds them.

Don Gonzalo, an impatient, gouty gentleman of the same age, enters with his servant Juanito, grumbling about idlers and about three priests who have taken "his" bench. Walking about in search of a seat, he scatters Laura's birds. She rebukes him sharply, and the two exchange insults — he mutters that she is a "senile old lady" who should be at home counting her beads, she remarks that he is "very polite" — before he is forced to share her bench. He calls for his book and a huge pair of glasses; she asks whether he is taking out a telescope. Then he offers her a pinch of snuff, they sneeze three times each, and, as she notes in an aside, "the snuff has made peace between us."

He reads aloud from the poet Campoamor, including the lines "Twenty years pass. He returns. And each, beholding the other, exclaims — Can it be that this is he? Heavens, is it she?" Laura recites them without spectacles, privately admitting, "I know every word by heart." Conversation turns to Valencia, and then to a seaside villa called Maricela, where, Gonzalo remembers, there once lived a beautiful girl named Laura Llorente, known as "The Silver Maiden".

Both are startled; both realise who the other is; and both decide to say nothing. Instead, under cover of speaking about "my cousin" and "my best friend", they retell their own love story — the horseman who tossed flowers up to her window, the merchant her parents wanted her to marry, the quarrel and the duel at sunrise on the beach. To explain why the lovers never met again, each invents a splendid death: Gonzalo says his cousin fell in a trench in Africa clutching the flag of Spain, and Laura says her friend walked into the rising tide at sunset after writing his name on the sand. Their asides tell the audience the truth — she married two years later, and he ran off to Paris with a ballet dancer within three months — and each privately recognises the other's lie.

The quarrel is long forgotten. He admits he was unreasonable; she asks sweetly whether he will come again tomorrow; he promises to bring crumbs for the birds. Yet each, with the other's back turned, resolves not to confess: "I am grotesque now", "I am too sadly changed" — each preferring that the other keep the memory of their youth. Petra returns with violets from her guard, and a few fall as Laura takes them. As they part, Don Gonzalo stoops "trembling and with a great effort" to pick up the fallen flowers, and Laura turns and catches him at it. "Yes, it is he!" "It is she, and no mistake." Waving farewell, they quote the poem to each other — "Can it be that this is he?" "Heavens, is it she?" — smile as though she were at her window again and he below among the roses, and leave on the arms of their servants, having agreed to meet tomorrow, if it is sunny.

1. (i) The speaker is Dona Laura, the white-haired lady of about seventy who is the heroine of the play. She has just arrived at her favourite bench in a park in Madrid, leaning on her maid's arm and using her parasol as a walking stick. (ii) "You" refers to Petra, her young maid, who is about twenty years old. Petra has just said, "The sun is hot," and Laura's reply — "Yes, you are only twenty" — means that at twenty one feels the heat, while at seventy one is grateful for it. (iii) The "guard" is the young park keeper whom Petra is in love with and who is waiting for her among the trees. Laura teases her about him a moment later — "He belongs more to you than he does to the park" and "Your head is where your heart is — with the guard." It is this same guard who later sends Laura the bunch of violets that brings about the recognition at the end of the play. (iv) Three things. First, Laura's age and frailty: "I feel more tired today than usual," and she must be helped to her seat. Second, her kindness and humour: she notices Petra's impatience, sends her off to her sweetheart without being asked, and only stipulates ten minutes — she is an indulgent mistress who enjoys young people's happiness. Third, her loneliness: once the maid has gone she is left alone with a bag of bread crumbs and a flock of pigeons, to whom she talks as if they were friends. The play needs all three facts in place before Don Gonzalo arrives, and it establishes them in four lines.

2. (i) She is addressing Don Gonzalo, the impatient old gentleman who has just entered with his servant Juanito, looking for a bench of his own and walking about the park in irritation. At this moment they are complete strangers to each other — or believe they are. (ii) She was feeding the pigeons. Having sent Petra away, she had risen, walked towards the trees and thrown three handfuls of bread crumbs, distributing them with great enjoyment — "These are for the spryest, these for the gluttons, and these for the little ones which are the most persistent" — and had gone back to her seat to watch them eat. (iii) Don Gonzalo scared them, by walking towards the birds with Juanito while hunting for a free bench. No, they are not pet birds: they are the wild pigeons of a public park, which Dona Laura feeds every day and has come to know individually — "that big one is always first! I know him by his big head." That is exactly what makes her claim on them so comic and so touching: she has no legal right to the birds at all, yet they are plainly hers. (iv) They are in a park in Madrid, the capital of Spain — in "a retired corner" of it, beside a bench, on a sunny autumn morning. Dona Laura is seated on the bench she regards as her own; Don Gonzalo is standing near the trees where the pigeons were feeding. (v) Because everything else grows out of it. Dramatically, it is the inciting incident: it forces two strangers into conversation who would otherwise have sat in silence, and it is Gonzalo's failure to find another seat that puts him on her bench. Thematically, it establishes both characters in a few strokes — her warmth and her fighting spirit, his selfishness and his absurd sense of ownership (he complains that the priests have taken "his" bench, and is instantly caught out when he claims that benches are "public property"). And it sets up the play's final reversal: the bad-tempered old man who scattered her birds in the first minutes promises, in the last, to bring crumbs for them himself — which is the play's quiet way of saying that he is in love with her again.