THE lady in the elegant hat is a familiar fixture at arts venues all over Scotland. Just a glance at her most recent reviews will suffice: dance at the Tramway, the CCA, the King’s in Edinburgh; drama at Oran Mor; theatre at Edinburgh’s Potterrow. And that only takes us back to late May. A list of all the cultural events Mary Brennan has ever reviewed would fill this page and the adjacent one. In her time she has also, lest it be forgotten, reviewed more pantos than you can shake a glow-stick at.

She has interviewed Mikhail Barynishikov in a smart Philadelphia apartment; she has sipped coffee made for her by the great flamenco guitarist, Paco Peña, in his home in Córdoba. She has never quite ceased to marvel at the fact that her name, followed by "The Herald", continues to open so many doors for her.

Tomorrow Glasgow University will award Brennan an Honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt). It is, she says, a genuine honour, every bit as unexpected as the Jane Attenborough One Dance UK Industry Award 2017, which she received last year. “We all do what we do and some of us are very lucky to do something that we love doing,” she says of the doctorate. “You realise that the honour is not just me; it’s the whole thing of arts coverage in a paper like The Herald. For a lot of people in the trade, they’re made up if Keith Bruce reviews the opera or if Coop [Neil Cooper] goes to the theatre. It’s an odd form of, I suppose, reassurance for them that there is somebody out there who is watching. The award is really for all of Team Arts. Long may we struggle on.”

Brennan, a Glaswegian, grew up in a household that adored live theatre, musicals and the pictures. “Because I was quite a relaxed child they could take me along and if I got bored, I could snooze. The one problem was that I thought theatre was like the cinema and that if you waited long enough it would all start up again. My late mother told me that when they started taking me to pantomimes, at Jack and the Beanstalk, I hid under the seat, because I thought I was the giant’s next snack. But I just had a family who were interested in the arts, and I grew up thinking that everybody went to the Citizens’ or the ballet. It was just custom and habit on my part.”

She got into journalism by accident. She was working in The Herald’s cuttings library when Chris Small, a long-serving drama critic with the paper, realising that he had reviewed university productions that she had taken part in, asked if she would be a ‘stringer’ for him. “And with that wonderful, blithe naivety of youth,” she says with a laugh, “I said ‘of course I will’. There were people in The Herald who took an interest in me and thought that I had a hackette in me. They suggested I should look to work on one of the weekly newspapers that were part of the Scottish Universal Investment Trust stable [SUITs then owned this paper]."

She ended up at the Johnstone Advertiser and attended Edinburgh’s Napier College as a graduate trainee. “I had no idea than that I was going to be involved with The Herald on the arts side. It was serendipity, really. You have to accept that there are moments when good luck comes your way, but it’s up to you to put in the graft and make the most of it.”

In her 30-plus years at this paper, she has covered many landmark events. One of them was Peter Brook’s ground-breaking production of the nine-hour-long epic, Mahabharata, in 1988. Not only was it a “tremendous” event in itself, she says, but it also “kickstarted the whole 1990 beanfeast of arts and culture that subsequently gave us Tramway and the much-missed Arches.”

“We had been quite used to the West End shows, after their London stint, coming up here, or doing a sort of paid-for rehearsal time before going to the West End. And suddenly, this was the one [Mahabharata] gig in the UK. It was the cake, the icing and the cherry. In itself, it was a totally profound experience, especially if you did the all-night, nine-hour version, where you went on an epic journey with this wonderful cross-cultural cast, and the sun would be coming up at the end. Folk wept; men who tend to try to choke back tears were visibly moved, because it has really been this triumph of spirit over adversity.

“It seemed to say that this is the harbinger of 1990, which says that Glasgow is a city that has all kinds of culture. It was a way of making the city fall in love with itself all over again. It was beyond special, and the lovely thing was that it meant that Brook then came back with other productions - Carmen, The Tempest. That had the effect of saying that Glasgow was on the European map, and that felt really special, because in a post-industrial time it was looking for a future-forward identity.”

She has also been hugely impressed by the notable achievements at Scottish Ballet, now “world-class form under Christopher Hampson”. She is full of praise for The Herald Angels award, a star-studded annual showcase at Edinburgh. “They’re a brilliant bridge between the ‘us and them’ assumptions in terms of critics and artists,” she argues. “It’s lovely to see the great names, such as Merce Cunningham, Sir Charles Mackerras and Pina Bausch, being honoured, but it’s the wee unknowns - like Ellie Dubois for No Show - that make my heart squeeze. It really matters to them. And when I pass one of the posters that blazons ‘Herald Angel’ winner across it - and I’ve seen them in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Madrid - I feel pure glee.” And she is similarly generous towards the rise of Scottish work for children and young people and for the pioneering work done by the Platform arts venue in Easterhouse.

There was a time when Mary could “cheerfully” be out four nights a week (“and that doesn’t count the things that I go to see for pleasure, or when I’m on a judging panel”). As for her hats, which she rarely removes in public, “they are my working persona,” she says affectionately. “I have 460 of them, at the last count. My husband, Peter [Easton, former BBC broadcaster] sometimes wonders if they’re all necessary, as he stumbles over yet another stack. But he is,” she adds, “very tolerant.”

She has so many imperishable memories, among them that coffee with Paco Pena, “one of the most generous, warm-hearted people” she has ever met. “The number of people that let you into their lives for an hour, or an hour and a half - you learn things, like the fact that [choreographer] Hans van Manen doesn’t like black jelly babies. I describe that sort of detail as a twinkle, which transforms people who are heroes to you into flesh and blood. And that is utterly magic. What’s not to love about that?”

She has interviewed almost everyone who mattered to her. “Most people in the arts understand how precarious it is for them. They need to reach the public before they get on stage, and if you have had the push from either the festival or their PR to say - ‘it’s okay, Mary doesn’t home in on things like gossip, she’s only interested about what you do on stage’ - which I am - then that is so helpful.

“But I have been lucky,” she concludes, modestly. “There is no other word for it.”