René Allio was born in Marseille in 1924. He started out as a painter after studying literature. He showed his works in Paris between 1957 and 1962. During the same period, he worked for the stage. First in Paris for avant-garde theatres, then in the provinces for various Dramatic Art Centres. In this way, he designed sets and costumes for a number of plays in the French and foreign repertoire and worked on the first performances of plays by Adamov, Vauthier, Ionesco, Alberti.
From 1957 on, he worked regularly with Roger Planchon, for several years on the stage design for all the productions at the Théâtre de la Cité, with plays by Brecht, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Marivaux, Marlowe, Gogol. He also worked for the Comédie française, the Paris Opera, the TNP and the most famous stages in Europe: Scala de Milan, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Cologne Opera...
His work led him to take a close interest in the problems of modern theatrical architecture and the transformation of the stage area. He designed the Théâtre d'Aubervilliers, collaborated on the design of the future Maison de la Culture in Tunisia, on the project to convert Arnold Wesker's "Rond House" and on the transformation of the former Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, now called the "Théâtre de la Ville". He made his cinema debut with an animated film that he designed for a stage production of Gogol's "Dead Souls" and continued with a short film that he shot in 1963. From that point on, until his death in 1995, he never stopped working for the cinema.
Les Films du Losange
