In Marking Time, Mike Pearson applies his method of performance archaeology to reflect on the relationship between performance and the city of Cardiff from the 1960s onward. The city appears as a place where innovative theatrical practices were explored and nourished though the activities of companies such as Cardiff Laboratory Theory, Diamond Age and Red Light Theatre, to mention a few, and through the launching of National Theatre Wales in 2010. The author, who has also been a prominent figure of the vibrant alternative theatre-making scene in Cardiff, evokes a range of performances that took place over the course of more than forty years as they have manifested themselves in particular environments and sociocultural contexts of the city. Through a wide range of performance recollections, this work calls attention to ‘a city composed of a multitude of circulatory dynamics, mobilities and rhythms, of barely discernible temporalities and manifold narratives’ (p. 9). The result of this endeavour is an extraordinary book, which asks, ‘what remains of performance and its places and what can we make of its remains?’ (p. 10).

In grappling with this question, Pearson proposes a time–space framework, where the notion of time as a structuring device becomes foregrounded in the analogy between performance and the city: performance uses time as a structuring device in the same way as the city itself uses it as an organizational device. This approach to some extent echoes Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of chronotope, where ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time, plot, and history’. Yet Pearson's version of the chronotope reveals even further the complex relationship between space and time, whereby the city is a set of ‘material and social conditions that may inform and prefigure the nature of the performance’ (p. 12). This brings a new dimension to the questions of performance remains, asking how they are stored in the landscape of the city and how the sense of performance duration figures in memory: how is performance time remembered?

Pearson describes his writing as ‘theory-inflected-storytelling’ (p. 17), which foregrounds the layered and fragmented micro-history of both performance and the city. He works with performance remains – that is, personal memories and anecdotes, photographs, material remains of buildings and sites – recollecting yet deliberately not reconstructing the past, suggesting but not imposing conceptual trajectories.

The book is divided into five sections – North, East, South, West, and Central – each starting with a map of the given area and featuring ten resonant performance locations. The map of Cardiff, which this book charts out, is both physical and mental, made of well-known public landmarks and of deeply personal landscapes of the city. This approach inspires not only thinking about the city as reflected through performance, but also thinking about performance, both in its making and in its scholarly evocations, as a unique form of psychogeography.

Marking Time, inscribing autobiography and personal recollections into analytical discourse and the wider sociocultural architecture of Cardiff, offers an original way of writing and thinking about performance and the city – this is a performance-studies methodology applicable beyond the book's particular topographies. It also provides the reader with a unique map of Cardiff's performance sites, a scenario for walking the city along personal and collective landmarks of its performance archaeologies.