As a ubiquitous aspect of quotidian and spectatorial experience, time has been a preoccupation of theatre since its earliest origins. However, it is only in recent years that temporality has begun to receive sustained critical attention in theatre and performance studies. Scholars now examine a range of temporal topics, such as repetition (Eirini Kartsaki), duration (Adrian Heathfield), reenactment (Rebecca Schneider), and the time of labor and capital (Nicholas Ridout). In Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History, Maurya Wickstrom builds upon this work, analyzing how theatre and performance can initiate different types of revolutionary time across a range of cultural and political contexts. The performances that Wickstrom analyzes present alternatives to chronological, objective, and Aristotelian time, and usurp the authority of “processional history” (15), which historically has been dominated by Western-centric, heteronormative outlooks as well as neoliberal and capitalist agendas. Such initiations enable those who have been marginalized by processional history to intervene in the way time is perceived, conceived, and lived, and to counter the idea that they must merely spectate the “supposedly unalterable flow [of time] as they move toward death” (15).

In the introduction (which doubles as Chapter 1), Wickstrom skillfully positions her study in relation to Walter Benjamin's materialist theory of history, the diverse understandings of the present in contemporary temporal and phenomenological theory, and the tendency of philosophical and dramaturgical models to emphasize theatre as a site of closures rather than openings. As well as offering a concise summary of each chapter, Wickstrom uses scorching prose to describe her experience of Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother (2010). Dancers dance “a convulsion in relation to chronological time” (4), and Wickstrom sees “the momentary upsurges of the shape of historical traumas, pushing up under and through the skin” (2). This preliminary account sets up the rest of the book well, giving the reader a palpable sense of the temporalities that will be studied.

Chapter 2 readdresses the political efficacy of the Haitian revolution as staged in plays by C. L. R. James and Aimé Césaire. Wickstrom uses Alain Badiou's concept of the new present, where past emancipatory ideas and imaginaries are viewed as “historically distributed presents” that retain their axiomatic assertions across history (71). This view is opposed to the “habitually practised tendency to see in past revolutions, movements, insurrections, in Occupy Wall Street, only their predictable failure” (46). Wickstrom analyzes the ways in which these plays stage the temporality of the Haitian revolution, focusing on its prominent protagonists and internal contradictions (between, for example, an insurgent black modernity and European modernity) to suggest that the present of the revolution comes into existence repeatedly under different times and conditions.

Chapter 3 examines how a “politics of existence against finitude” (117) is initiated by the work of Andrew Schneider, Gob Squad, William Kentridge, and Romeo Castellucci. Guided by Giorgio Agamben's concept of penultimate time, the reader is taken through a series of performances that each stage a “time before the end” where temporal creativity and political innovation manifest (119). Wickstrom's reading of the child performers in Gob Squad's Before Your Very Eyes (2011) is particularly effective, drawing on Benjamin to show how the theatrical process enables the children to withdraw from their “role as the future” and their “obligations to processional history” (51). Instead, the children revel in their taking hold of time and lampoon “theatre's assumed inextricability from death” (165).

In Chapter 4 Wickstrom extends the work of the previous chapter via Antonio Negri's conception of kairos and explores how performance may initiate a time that is “undefinable by the futural directionality of processional history” (173). Via an analysis of works by Forced Entertainment, Cassils, Omar Rajeh, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Wickstrom forcefully opposes the “anxious, nauseating” futurity of modernity and capitalism that has facilitated widespread immiseration and social injustice (53). For example, the self-immolation of Cassils during their performance of Inextinguishable Fire (2015) is read as exemplifying “fiery initiations of kairological being,” where the performer is brought “to the edge of time, out of the narrativity of hopeless futures carried out in and through violence” and finds a way “to lean out over the void, bearing the cost and the terror, toward an alternative being” (199–200). Wickstrom ends this chapter with a summary of temporal studies that intersect with her own, such as Donna Haraway's Chthulucene and Mark Rifkin's work on indigenous and colonial temporality, and in a playful, paradoxical way points toward potential future directions of the temporal critique she has initiated with this book.

Given the emphasis that Wickstrom places on theatre and performance's formal relationship with time, there is perhaps a missed opportunity to examine the propensity of certain theatrical forms or genres to initiate history in the ways she outlines. The range of case studies includes devised theatre, performance art, postcolonial drama, and intermedial dance performance, and the reader is left wondering whether there are any disciplinary, institutional, or social tendencies that render these forms more or less able to remake and reimagine time. There can be no doubt, however, that Wickstrom's articulate unpacking of complex temporal concepts, such as kairos and the new present, renders them both useful and usable for artists, academics, and postgraduate students who work with/on time. Although these concepts may present a challenge for undergraduate students due to their theoretical intricacy, this is no doubt an intellectual endeavor many will enjoy, given the political urgency and emotive quality of Wickstrom's analysis. The book combines a political universality (a belief in the universal conditions of justice, recognition, and equal distribution) with an attention to specific political contexts, which is refreshing given the tendency of theatre and performance scholars to privilege the latter over the former. Overall, Fiery Temporalities is a significant contribution to the study of time in theatre and performance studies, in both a political and a conceptual sense, and frequently presents readers with images and provocations that likely will be seared into their mind's eye for some time to come.