Kath Mainland: First lady of the Fringe

'THERE'S a type of woman, which I think I am – I don't know what the type is (called]," says Kath Mainland when asked how she handles Fringe comedians or festival rowdies, "but at Hogmanay we deal with loads of rowdies and great, noisy men who are rude and sweary – a certain type of woman is very good at getting those men to do things."

Modest, camera-shy, insisting that she has "no artistic ambitions" despite an entire working life spent on Edinburgh's festival scene, the new chief executive of the Edinburgh Fringe has a reputation for getting things done.

A famous high point of her festival career was throwing Hollywood star Christian Slater out of the Assembly Rooms' bar, in the year that his role in the Fringe play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest became a running drama of its own.

"It was his birthday and he was enjoying himself a little bit too much. I didn't throw him out of the bar, I threw him out from behind the bar… he chose to leave," she says.

For the past two years, Kath Mainland has appeared at the top of The Scotsman's list of speculative candidates to run the Fringe. It became something of a running joke, but represented a lot of wishful thinking on the festival circuit.

Her name first surfaced when the long-time Fringe director Paul Gudgin stepped down in early 2007. It appeared again after the man chosen to succeed him, Jon Morgan, quit suddenly during a calamitous summer when the repeated failures of the Fringe box office system saw ticket sales plunge 10 per cent.

As the first "chief executive" of the Edinburgh Fringe, Mainland carries a heavy burden of expectation on her shoulders. She is expected, above all, to restore confidence to the biggest of the city's festivals, after a troubled year and in the thick of recession.

Her appointment means that of the four big Edinburgh festivals, three are now run by women. Artistic director Hannah McGill and managing director Ginnie Atkinson are the team at the Edinburgh International Film Festival; Catherine Lockerbie is the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where Mainland remains as administrative director until her move to the Fringe in May. While Jonathan Mills is artistic director of Edinburgh International Festival, there is a strong female presence on the management side there, and the newcomer – the Edinburgh Art Festival – has Joanne Brown as director.

"There are a lot of women in the arts. I think that's because women are really good at multi-tasking, really hard-working and don't mind working for less money – or at least, money isn't the primary driver in choosing a career."

Mainland (who lives in Edinburgh and whose 'bidey-in', about whom she is reticent to speak, works in outdoor events), quotes Jack Nicholson in his role as a grouchy romantic novelist in the film As Good as It Gets. A receptionist asks his character, Melvin Udall: "How do you write women so well?" He growls back: "I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability."

Kath Mainland was born in 1969 in Orkney, where "the family tree goes back to something like 1551", and "Mainland" is also the name of Orkney's main island. Her appetite for the theatre was cultivated by her parents. Her father, a fiddle player in his spare time, led excursions to Pitlochry for the summer theatre and also to London's West End when they stayed with relatives in Surrey.

Mainland went to Glasgow University to read English literature, then went on to Strathclyde to take an accounting diploma. "I did accountancy not because I ever wanted to be an accountant, but because millions of other people had an English literature degree and not a huge idea of where that would go. Lots of people were going into teaching, but I didn't want to do that. I've always loved the theatre; my parents are huge theatregoers and dad is an amateur musician – a very good one – so I did want to work with theatre and the arts. I had done part-time, temporary, student jobs in theatre and so on. The accountancy was really about getting the business back-up to go with that. Then a Fringe job was advertised, just after I graduated."

At the time, Mainland was looking after a pair of Shetland ponies for the King's Theatre pantomime. "It involved a lot of sweeping up sh*t, as you would imagine, because they got quite nervous on stage."

In 1991, the newly graduated Mainland undertook her first proper job, as a Fringe administrative assistant in an office of five women, under the then "administrator" Mhairi Mackenzie-Robinson. That year, a little-known comedian named Eddie Izzard was playing a 200-seat venue at the Gilded Balloon in the Cowgate.

Mainland's job included making tea, emptying the bins, answering phones and – her first big project – compiling the venue lists.

"That's a huge job still, but was quite big in those days because we only had one computer and two big, green terminals. If two people tried to save a file at the same time the data would be lost, so when they pressed 'save', they shouted 'happy'. It's unbelievable to think that's how we did it," she laughs.

From the primitive beginnings of her career – she went on to become a freelance festivals and events producer, working closely with the Assembly Rooms and Edinburgh's Hogmanay through the Millennium celebrations – Mainland was drawn not so much by the magic of theatre as by how that magic was achieved.

"There's escapism, there's understanding (things] through the through the lens of somebody else's interpretation of it, but I've always been really fascinated by the practicalities – how you get back from this idea on to the stage, or on to a film, or on to a book."

It is why she has stayed on the side of arts administration, working with artistic directors rather than making artistic decisions herself. "I've never had any artistic ambitions," Mainland insists.

She has, though, an intimate knowledge of what it's like for performers at the Fringe. She calls it "an enormous journey… people turn up at the beginning, you have talked to them on the phone, for six months probably, then they arrive, you meet them, they are nervous… you just go on this journey with them."

Since 2005, Mainland has become used to handling authors, rather than actors and comedians. "They don't seem to have egos like actors, and generally are delighted to be here. But many are not performers, so they get quite nervous. The big difference is we don't see them for six weeks, just in and out for a day or two."

But the Fringe remains her first love. "I'm delighted they have given me the job. I have a passion for the Fringe and a knowledge of it, I've worked in and around it. It's really important for performers, who can come from all over the world, and it's really important for the city and the people of Edinburgh. There's this enormous explosion of culture that happens on your doorstep – that's just brilliant."