An invitation to compose music for a stage adaptation of The Master and Margarita was already unexpected enough. But for Datarock’s Fredrik Saroea, the project became even stranger when he was also asked to portray the enigmatic Woland, Satan himself, despite never having acted before.
Presented at Bergen’s Den Nationale Scene in collaboration with the Bergen International Festival, the production reimagined Mikhail Bulgakov’s surreal and politically charged novel across Stalin-era Moscow, biblical Jerusalem, and present-day Bergen, blending humor, tragedy, magic, and music into an ambitious theatrical spectacle.
What began as a theater commission ultimately evolved into an album that sounds far removed from both Datarock’s frenetic dance-punk and Saroea’s earlier solo work. Drawing from cinematic textures, clarinet-led arrangements, electronic sound design, and emotionally driven atmospheres, the music functions both as a companion to the production and as a standalone listening experience. In this interview, Saroea discusses the unlikely path that led him to the stage, composing music for theater, reconstructing the material into an album after the production ended, and why The Master and Margarita remains so relevant today.
I know this album is comprised of music from a theatrical project. Could you talk a bit about how you initially got involved with this?
Fredrik Saroea: Yeah, it’s completely absurd. It was such a random, surprising situation. I was actually on my way to my first day at work. I had a new position as an art director at a big cultural event space. And the director of the National Theater of Bergen called me and asked me if I could drop by for a coffee. I said, “Perfect, because I’m passing the theater on my way to the new job.” She’s a friend, so I didn’t think much of it.
But when I got there, she asked me, “Do you want the main part in the main play next year?” At basically the national theater in Bergen, Norway. And I was like, “Why would you ask me that?” I’d never acted. I never wanted to act. I didn’t do amateur theater as a kid or anything like that.
But apparently the Danish director who was staging The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov had seen Datarock play live at a theater festival. Because it was a theater festival, that particular show was a little more theatrical than usual, so he got kind of an exaggerated version of me as a stage persona. I entered onto the stage in one of those lifts, seven meters above the ground, and I’m actually afraid of heights, so I was probably very animated because I was genuinely terrified. I guess he thought that meant I had acting skills, which I really don’t.
So I called him and asked, “Why do you want me to play Woland?” Which is Satan, by the way. And he said the way I act onstage in Datarock was exactly how he imagined Satan. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment. But I told him that if he really wanted to try it, I was willing to do it.
Then, because he liked the music I do, he also asked if I wanted to compose the music for the production. So by the time rehearsals started, I’d already spent half a year living with the book. The director originally thought the show would be six hours long because the book is so complicated. Luckily, it ended up being three hours including the intermission, because if he had told me from the start that it was going to be six hours across 42 performances, I probably would have said no.
One of the songs used in the production was “Sympathy for the Devil,” which obviously couldn’t be included on the album because it’s almost impossible to get approval from the Rolling Stones. But that song is heavily inspired by The Master and Margarita, so it was part of the conversation around the production from the very beginning. I think the director also assumed, because Datarock sometimes shares some of that energy, that I’d be a good fit to compose the music. I don’t think he expected the music to end up sounding the way it did, though, because it’s very different from Datarock and very different from my solo material.
What was the experience like acting, having never done it before? Was it a challenge?
Fredrik Saroea: What I realized very quickly is that in theater, you’re just a tiny wheel in a huge machine. In our production, I think we had 13 actors, and many of them played multiple characters. Every scene change involved costume changes, lighting cues, technicians, sound engineers, all of that. So even though I was onstage talking in front of all these people, you’re part of such a complicated structure that it actually felt reassuring.
I was surprised that I had no trouble memorizing lines, because I thought that would be difficult. But every scene is an interaction, and all the actors I worked with were incredibly experienced. A lot of them were actually old friends of mine from overlapping creative circles in Bergen, so they were all very supportive. I honestly expected some primadonna issues because my face was on the poster, but everybody was super nice to me.
The director also barely directed me. He’d basically just go, “Yeah, that’s what Satan would do,” and move on. And because theater is so technical, there’s not much room for improvisation anyway. You have to cross the stage before the light comes on, react to a cue, move when something happens. I probably shouldn’t say this, but theater is basically a giant, incredibly complicated Excel spreadsheet. It really is.
What surprised me most was how similar it felt to playing live shows. When musicians perform, we all go into some kind of character to a certain extent. Not necessarily a caricature, but a heightened version of yourself. So honestly, I didn’t find acting that difficult. I even got good reviews, which made me very happy. But I’ve also played something like 1,500 shows in 36 countries, so performing in front of people already felt very natural to me.
Since the music is different from Datarock and your solo material, what were some of the inspirations behind it?
Fredrik Saroea: The story moves between Moscow in what’s assumed to be the late 1930s and Jerusalem around the time of Christ. And in our adaptation, part of the story even took place in Bergen. So the music had to create different worlds and emotional settings depending on the scene.
The first several tracks on the album are really more like place signatures than traditional songs. They establish the sound of Moscow, Jerusalem, and so on. Then there are thematic pieces connected to specific characters. So the biggest inspiration was always what the director wanted each scene to feel like emotionally.
When it came to imagining Moscow in the late ’30s, I honestly had no idea what that would really sound like. So I probably drew from a mixture of classical music, film scores, clichés, memories, and whatever my brain associated with that setting. I didn’t want to imitate a specific Russian or Ukrainian composer, though. It was all very intuitive.
Originally I wanted to use a lot of traditional Russian instruments, but we realized that could become too cliché very quickly. The clarinet was the one instrument we felt we could use without it becoming cartoonish. There’s a lot of clarinet on the album, and some saxophone too. There’s also a lot of piano. I tried to use instruments and sounds that felt somewhat timeless.
Usually with Datarock I can point directly to very specific references and influences. Here, I honestly can’t. Though I did realize afterward that the theme for Pontius Pilate sounds a lot like Justice’s “Genesis.” But I didn’t take it directly from there. It came from a section of another song I’d already written called “Woland,” where it was just part of a much larger arrangement. By the time I noticed the similarity, it was too late. So sorry, Justice.
And “Elusive Dream (Yalta Version)” is basically a reworked version of a song from my previous solo album Lucid Dream, just with a different arrangement and context. That one probably has some old bossa nova influence in it somewhere. Usually I’m very clear about my references, but with this project I really wasn’t.
Does the album represent all of the music from the production, or was there a lot of restructuring involved?
Fredrik Saroea: Oh man, that process was unbelievably frustrating. I had six months to compose the material initially, and then I brought in two collaborators: the saxophone player from Datarock and an electronic artist called Stian Balducci. Stian comes from a sound art background, and even though he’s also a Norwegian Grammy-winning techno artist, the way he thinks about music is completely different from me.
For me, a melody is a specific set of notes. For him, a melody is more like a feeling that can be twisted into all kinds of different forms while still remaining the same piece. That difference actually made him really exciting to work with.
But the problem was that the production kept changing constantly during rehearsals. Scenes were shortened, extended, rearranged, or cut entirely, so the music had to constantly evolve alongside the production. Onstage, the music functioned mostly as sonic scenography rather than standalone compositions.
Trying to turn those two and a half hours of material back into an album afterward was unbelievably difficult. It felt like someone had taken apart a Lego X-Wing and dumped the pieces into a giant box with a million other Lego sets. Reconstructing the album took me months.
There was a huge amount of material that never made it onto the album. Some tracks are 40 seconds long, while one is 16 minutes. I had to decide which textures, themes, and soundscapes actually worked outside the context of the stage production. Even the sequencing changed, because the theater version didn’t always follow the narrative chronologically.
What I loved about theater was being part of someone else’s larger vision. But once I took the music back and tried to make it my own album, it became a completely different experience. Interesting, but very different. Still, it was important for me to show that I could do this kind of work, because I’d absolutely do something like this again for the right project.
At what point did you realize you wanted to release this as an album?
Fredrik Saroea: I actually had an agreement with the theater that allowed me to use the compositions after the final performance. The theater is obviously a big institution with contracts and intellectual property agreements and all that. Coincidentally, the guy handling all the contracts was an old friend of mine that I used to skateboard with as a kid.
Part of the agreement also allowed me to use recordings from the actual performances. So some of what you hear on the album was recorded live during the shows. We recorded three full performances, which was incredibly complicated because every actor had microphones on at all times, even backstage during costume changes. Everything was being recorded constantly. Everybody had to agree to it, and afterward we had to carefully erase anything that wasn’t supposed to be used.
At first I genuinely wasn’t sure whether the material worked as an album. I kept asking myself, “Is this actually an album?” Then I started talking with Mark Rankin, who used to work as a mastering engineer at The Exchange in London before going on to produce artists like Adele, Queens of the Stone Age, Weezer, and Harry Styles. I sent him the material and asked what he thought. He basically said, “Let’s go.” So we did.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Fredrik Saroea: Yeah. If people like this album, they should also check out my previous solo album Lucid Dream, because “Yalta” actually comes from that record in another form. What’s funny is that I was recording Lucid Dream at the exact same time I was writing and rehearsing all the music for this theater production, so my brain was completely overloaded.
But more importantly, I really hope this album inspires people to read The Master and Margarita, because it’s an incredible book. It regularly appears on lists of the greatest novels of the last century. It’s not some obscure cult thing. It’s genuinely one of the great novels.
And it still feels incredibly relevant because it was written by an artist living under a totalitarian system. Back then it was Stalin. Now… well, pick your country. The history behind the book is almost as fascinating as the book itself. Bulgakov started writing it in 1928, died in 1940, and it wasn’t properly published until decades later. A lot of the character of “The Master” reflects Bulgakov himself — the fear, the breakdown, the anxiety around publishing the work.
I probably spent as much time reading about the history surrounding the book as I did actually reading the book itself. Hopefully this album can work as a companion piece for people discovering it.
Click here to buy or stream the album. For more info on the show, visit the Bergen International Festival site.
