Whilst preparing for battle, the hero will experience many doubts and inner conflicts. In the ensuing sections, the opponents send messengers to each other until they finally meet in person. The play begins with audience scenes in the palaces of opposing monarchs, where the main conflict is presented. However, a lakon follows a more or less standard structure. They serve merely as guides to the performances, including lists of scenes and personages, and descriptions of the action in the actual play, which in practice includes a great deal of improvisation not written in the lakon. Sometimes the lakon are faithful to the original texts, but in many cases the epic heroes have been removed from their authentic contexts and have been written into new, purely Javanese, fantasies. This includes both pre-Hindu material and lakon based directly on the Mababbarata and the Ramayana epics, whose heroes are regarded as the mythical ancestors of the Javanese. The four oldest cycles, dealing with the ancient history of Java, are collectively named wayang purwa ( purwa: primeval, original, ancient). Present-day Javanese shadow puppets are, in turn, believed to have evolved into their extremely elongated and almost non-figurative style during the period of Muslim rule, thus reflecting Islam’s ban on making a human image. The Balinese puppets still bear strong resemblances to the so-called wayang-style reliefs in East Javanese temples, discussed above, which are believed to have shared a common style with the contemporary East Javanese shadow puppets. In the East Javanese period, shadow theatre is believed to have been adopted by the Hindu courts of Bali during the long process of its Indianisation.

The earliest record confirming the existence of shadow theatre in Central Java dates from AD 907. This is often supported by the fact that part of the shadow-theatre repertoire is based on pre-Hindu story cycles, and that all the technical terms of the genre are Javanese and not derived from Sanskrit or other Indian languages. The other view maintains that Javanese shadow theatre has ancient indigenous roots. According to one theory, it came from India together with the Ramayana and Mababbarata epics during the long process of Java’s Indianisation. There are two theories concerning the roots of Javanese shadow theatre.

Although these forms of theatre are highly developed, and wayang golek still thrives, they are clearly surpassed by wayang kulit in popularity and complexity. Shadow drama gave rise to other forms of puppet theatre, for example, wayang klitik with flat wooden puppets and wayang golek with three-dimensional rod puppets, which are discussed in separate sections. Video clip: The end scene from a wayang kulit shadow play, which is based on the epic Mahabharata Reijo Lainela

Wayang kelir screen