He had staged his first play ("Dead Voices") in 1963, became fascinated with the craft, and from then on, with his mixture of traditional religious ritual performances and Western avant-garde experiments, was able to create a large following.

During the 1970s, his plays such as "Mastodon", "The Condors", "The Struggle of the Naga Tribe" and "The Regional Secretary" were often banned because they openly criticized Suharto's development programs that tended to side with multinational corporations against the interests of indigenous peoples.

Rendra performed Shakespeare, Brecht and, as a devoted student of the Sino-Indonesian kung fu school "Persatuan Gerak Badan Bangau Putih" (White Crane Martial Arts Association),[1] he always looked much younger than his age and played Hamlet when he was well into his sixties.

In 1979, during a poetry reading in the Taman Ismail Marzuki art center in Jakarta, Suharto's military intelligence agents threw ammonia bombs on to the stage and arrested him.

He was imprisoned in the notorious Guntur Military Police detention center for nine months, spending time in solitary confinement in a mosquito infested cell with a ceiling too low to stand up.

[3] After he was released from prison he was banned from performing poetry or drama until 1986, when he wrote, directed and starred in his eight-hour-long play "Panembahan Reso", which discussed the issue of the succession of power, which was a taboo subject at that time.

After the fall of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 and the beginning of democratization, he was a dominant figure in the emerging world of modern Indonesian literature and theater and became the patron of an unrestricted, free and socially engaged artistic community.