BoConcept Canterbury are delighted to invite you to join us for a talk by Dr Jean Baker* celebrating the life and achievements of Sarah Baker, an amazing and inspirational 18th century woman of humble origins who became one of the most successful women of her generation.
In 1789, Sarah Baker an illiterate fairground performer opened the first of, what she described as, her ‘great grand’ theatres in Orange Street, Canterbury – the building now occupied by BoConcept. By then in her fifties, the former ‘vagabond’ went on to open three more purpose-built theatres in Kent. Sarah’s long life spanned a period of great turbulence and change in this country and she played a key role - albeit inadvertently - in the political, social and cultural development of the rapidly evolving Kentish towns in which she built her theatres at the end of the eighteenth century.
Please join us for this fascinating talk over drinks & nibbles.
Time: 5.30pm for a 6.00pm start.
*Dr Jean Baker (not a descendant of Sarah Baker) worked as a journalist for some years. In 2000 she completed a PhD at the University of Kent that explored the significance of provincial theatre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 'Her book, Sarah Baker and her Kentish Theatres, 1737-1816: Challenging the Status Quo was the Society for Theatre Research's annual publication for 2019
Image: James Winston, watercolour sketch of Sarah Baker’s Canterbury theatre, 1802. No. 16 in ‘Watercolour drawings of theatres and other buildings in towns of the south of England: the original drawings for James Winston’s Theatric Tourist, 1805, 1802’. By permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
