Interview: Mike Maran - All roads lead to Rome

The 60-year-old actor-storyteller is looking in fine fettle, all things considered: he recently came off a motor scooter at 50km per hour during an emergency stop, thereby failing a module of his scooter test, as well as sustaining a few bruises. Then there was that cancer business…

Cancer is why the Edinburgh-born, Cambridge-based Maran, a consummate Fringe troubadour of more than 30 years standing (bar a few years' "paternity leave"), won't be staging a Fringe show this year. Instead, on Tuesday morning, having finished a three-day Edinburgh Jazz Festival run of his show A Funny Valentine, he will mount a bright red Vespa scooter and take the road to Rome, to raise 100,000 for three cancer charities in recognition of the medical skills which have given him a new lease of life.

He had been hoping to do the charity run on a slightly more powerful scooter, but his test mishap means he's doing it still wearing L plates, so an under-250cc model it has to be. He's bruised but undaunted: "I've discovered that if you've got your basic training and a driving licence, which I have, with L plates on you can drive a 125cc round the world, although not on motorways."

For the moment, Italy will suffice, the source and inspiration for many shows by this son of an Edinburgh-Italian family, such as Caledonia 'n' Italia, which in 1993 began his association with Valvona's, Private Angelo, The Little World of Don Camillo and his hugely popular adaptation of Louis de Bernires's best-seller, Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Cancer, they say, affects one out of three people, but it was while touring with Corelli last year that cancer struck not just one but two of the show's cast of three, Maran and musician Alison Stephens, a world-class maestro of the eponymous mandolin. It was Mike who first broke the news that he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer and was going into Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge for an operation. During that relatively straightforward procedure, the surgeons found a secondary cancer on his pancreas.

Three months later, Stephens announced that she had cervical cancer and would require a course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy at Addenbrooke's. The month after that, Maran explained that he would have to go back into Addenbrooke's for a major operation at the beginning of last November. "The bowel cancer had thrown out a secondary to my pancreas, and that suggested that it must be everywhere else, so they spent most of September-October looking for it, but they couldn't find it – 'Where have you hidden it, Mr Maran?'" he grins.

"It was unheard of for a single secondary to be thrown out from a bowel to the pancreas."

The Whipple procedure, as the eight-hour operation to remove part of his pancreas is known, saved his life, he reckons.

"Before that, 20 months was all they reckoned I had."

While Maran was recovering at Addenbrooke's, Ali Stephens was downstairs undergoing radiotherapy and, in a gloriously bizarre episode, the Captain Corelli mandolinist (whose playing can also be heard in the soundtrack of the film, starring Nicolas Cage) ended up serenading Mike and his fellow patients, much to the bemusement of the ward manager.

It's the moment that Maran regards as the inception of Captain Corelli's Cambridge Cancer Club. The acronym is five Cs – "C major," as he likes to put it, even although there are only two members, himself and Stephens.

Their aim is to raise that 100,000 for three cancer charities, the Macmillan Cancer Support, Addenbrooke's Charitable Trust and the Edinburgh-based KIS Endowment Fund, which supports bowel cancer research.

"I met my surgeon…" he laughs self-deprecatingly, "my surgeon – you get quite possessive about them – in the supermarket the other day with his son, and he said to him, 'This is my star patient, and we went to see his show and I was hypnotised from the moment it started until the end.'

"I said to the boy, 'And that was without an anaesthetic. When your dad performed for me, I needed an anaesthetic'."

And on 28 November, all going well, Louis de Bernires, the novelist behind the original Captain Corelli's Mandolin – who once told Maran, "I'd rather see your show than that film any day" – has agreed to hand over a cheque to this surgeon, Emmanuel Huguet, at a gala performance of the show at the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge, with its full complement of Maran, Stephens and pianist and flautist Anne Evans.

The money will go to the Addenbrooke's and MacMillan charities. Before that, on 7 November, another performance is scheduled for the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, when a cheque will be handed over to the KIS Endowment Fund.

Before that, however, Maran has many thousands of miles to cover. He reckons the journey from Edinburgh to Rome to be between 1,500 and 2,000 miles, but to avoid a boring identical return route, he will come back via Spain, courtesy of the Livorno-Barcelona and Bilbao-Portsmouth ferries. Total mileage for the round trip? He and Stephens are organising a sweepstake on that one, he says, conspiratorially.

"There's no way out of this for me now," he says. "If I fall off my bike again, I'll just have to get up and walk."

The scooter-borne troubadour's send-off from Valvona & Crolla on Tuesday should be a suitably flamboyant business, attended by Stephens and Anne Evans, as well as Philip Contini, the managing director of the delicatessen, who has a parallel existence as Maran's sometime collaborator (he co-wrote Corelli) and also as a singer of Neapolitan songs.

Valvona's has a busy Fringe programme, but on this occasion Maran doesn't figure on it. Will he miss his annual dose of his home city in full festival fling? "Do you know," he smiles wryly, "I've begun to wonder whether putting on a show at the same time as 600 other shows is really a great idea. The Fringe has become something else, and I'm not sure if I'm part of it. When I come here I want to say this is my home gig, but the place is full of all kinds of people who are coming on as if they owned the place – and of course, if you're on the Fringe, you have to be self-confident and brash like that."

So this year he made do with A Funny Valentine, his well-received show about the self-destructive trumpeter Chet Baker, which he is performing until Sunday with trumpeter Colin Steele and pianist Robert Pettigrew during the Jazz Festival. "So, the short answer is, no, I'm not going to miss the Fringe, but I'm going to have a ball on the road to Rome.

That said, he admits that as he rides that wee red Vespa south, he'll be thinking about his next show, which he says will be about the Dunbar-born pioneer environmentalist and father of the American national parks system, John Muir. Not one for half- measures, he says he's taking a bivvi bag and plans to sleep out, weather permitting, along the way.

Maran has been through a rough time, but he's riding it out, literally. It was John Muir, after all, who declared that everybody needs places "where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul" – although he probably didn't have red motor scooters in mind.

For further information, or to make a donation, see www.ccccc.uk.com

A Funny Valentine, with Mike Maran, Colin Steele and Robin Pettigrew, is at the Bosco tent in George Square Gardens tonight until Sunday, part of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.

POSTCARD PROMISE

MIKE Maran is offering to send postcards along the way to donors to Captain Corelli's Cambridge Cancer Club (CCCCC). "There are no hard and fast rules about it; we are suggesting that people give whatever they can. But if you can manage 50 quid, I'll send you a postcard from somewhere – I'll write it in my own hand, and it won't just be 'Wish you were here.' And if you can give 100, I'll send you two, and so on.

His target is 100,000 for three cancer charities, the Macmillan Cancer Support, Addenbrooke's Charitable Trust and the Edinburgh-based KIS Endowment Fund, which supports bowel cancer research.

Back in Britain, Alison Stephens, still undergoing treatment for cancer, will maintain the website for the venture, which has already raised some 10,000 – "so there's only 99,000 to go and we've just started," says Maran brightly. "The idea is that sponsors become sort of virtual pillion passengers in the comfort of their own homes, and we'll send e-mails and photographs."

Except, of course, they won't have to worry about emergency stops.

On 28 November, all going well, Louis de Bernires, below, author of the original Captain Corelli's Mandolin, will hand over a cheque to the Addenbrooke's surgeon, Emmanuel Huguet, at a gala performance of Maran's show.