His mother, Vanda Adolfivna (nata Kulczycka), born in Staryi Skalat, was also an actress, the daughter of an Austrian, Adolf Teichman.

[2] This was determined by the need to lead Ukrainian culture out of the provincialism it had fallen into as a result of the century-long occupation by Poland and Russia.

In the midst of the first world war Kurbas formed the "Ternopil theatrical evenings" (1915–1916)[2] and the Molody Teatr (Young Theater) in Kyiv in 1916, which was the first ensemble to experiment with both new and ancient acting techniques.

[2] In 1925 Vadim Meller was awarded a gold medal for the scenic design of the "Berezil'" theatre (Exposition Internationale des Modernes, Paris ).

His stagings of the time included "Gas" by the German author Georg Kaiser and "Jimmy Higgins" by Upton Sinclair.

In 1927 Kurbas met up-and-coming playwright Mykola Kulish in the Ukrainian capital of the time, Kharkiv, where the "Berezil'" had moved in 1926.

While productions as The People's Malakhii (1928), Myna Mazailo (1929) and Maklena Grassa (1933) set new standards in ensemble play and dramatic rigor, they also fell foul with the official Soviet propaganda policy.

In 1930, just before the artificial famine in Ukraine, Kurbas was forced to stage Dyktatura ("Dictatorship"), by Ukrainian playwright Ivan Mykytenko.

The propaganda play was an attempt to justify the Soviet policy that ultimately led to the starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry and caused several million deaths (the Holodomor).

Kurbas turned the sense of the play around, a technique he named "recoding", and made a satirical and tragic opera out of a what had been a dull realist plot.

The Taras Schevchenko Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre in Kharkiv is an heir to Berezil's magnificent artistic traditions.

As his friend and competitor Vsevolod Meyerhold would do later during his own imprisonment, Kurbas organized a camp theater and was even in touch with the author of one of the plays he staged to discuss dramaturgical decisions.

Kurbas was then moved to the remote Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, and was one of the "lost transport" of prisoners shipped back to the mainland in 1937 from Solovki.

Some hagiographers claim that Kurbas was a genius (he was indeed multi-talented) who anticipated every development of the later 20th century theater (some of which he did, as for example in the work of Italian director Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret).