From the moment I walk in to The Dome at BATS Theatre, where 100 Things is being performed, there is a bubbling excitement. The three performers, all from Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland – Rebecca Mary Gwendolon, Izzy Renton and Frankie Brown – are all dressed in denim dungarees, a roll of masking tape at the hip, and individually coloured Powerades at the ready. They are ready for a Herculean task.

Their self-imposed challenge, to incorporate 100 audience generated ‘Things’ within a 60 minute show, was apparently rejected as a contender for a Guinness World Record attempt but, as an improviser myself, the prospect certainly makes me sweat. What makes it all the more challenging, is that the players mean to stitch all of these things together into a single narrative.

We began with a list of 20 sound and lighting cues, ranging from Chartreuse lighting, to Taylor Swift Screaming Goats. It’s worth highlighting the talents of D-Woods on the lighting and sound effects desk, and Matt Hutton on keyboard and sometimes vocals, who really feels like a part of the team. The audience goes wild as Matt’s underscoring became ‘jazz’, or D turns the lights to ‘disco’, marking another two ‘Things’ off the list.

We are periodically revisited to get a few more lists of 10 ‘Things’ as the show progresses: ‘Names’, ‘Events’, and ‘Things My Therapist Said’, for example. This helps to avoid the audience and players both being quite overwhelmed, though I do sometimes find my attention drifting away from the story and back to the listed items still waiting to be crossed out, stressing out a bit as the time ticks down.

Inevitably, some of the eponymous ‘Things’ are marked off without having a huge impact on the narrative, but an impressive number of them do! Charli XCX becomes a major character based on one of the sound effects, and the players put their memories to the test with plenty of callbacks to earlier ‘Things’.

All in all, it’s fair to say that the players achieve their challenge. The remarkably coherent story comes to a conclusion moments before the buzzer. It even ends up with a pretty strong anti-bullying message, about the benefits of sisterhood – in the form of a witch’s coven.

As the players take their bows, all 100 Things have been crossed off and accounted for, plastered to the back wall like the mad ramblings of a dadaist conspiracy theorist. Guiness World Records should be devastated to have missed it.

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