Stage business ... Theatres will compete for cash in a live event. Photograph: Getty Images
Theatre's often uneasy relationship with business has come a long way since the 1980s when Max Stafford-Clark, then artistic director of the Royal Court, complained that it often felt less like he was running a theatre and more like he was running a marketing incentive scheme in Sloane Square. Lessons have also been learned from sponsorship deals - they are now frequently proper grown-up relationships rather than shotgun weddings of convenience that quickly descend into unhappiness and resentment.
In a fast-cooling economic climate where funding is under threat, relationships between theatre and business are more important than ever, and it is worth remembering that theatre companies are businesses too, albeit ones that are not driven by financial imperatives but by artistic ones.
Anyone who thinks that sponsorship can replace regular subsidy is not living on this planet. However, while there will always be companies producing work that is anathema to sponsors, there are plenty of cutting-edge companies for whom sponsorship is no longer just the icing on the cake, but part of the cake itself. Take a festival such as Fierce in Birmingham, which over the last few years has proved itself an essential date on the calendar with a programme of radical work that also attracts large audiences. Fierce may not always succeed in getting cash sponsorship, but the festival just couldn't make its budget balance without the support and sponsorship in kind it receives from businesses, particularly those based in the Midlands who recognize the value of the festival.
Others thinking outside the box include Stan's Café, another Birmingham company, which earlier this year came second in the Midland World Trade Forum Exporter of the Year Award. The winner was a company that exports industrial sponges to China; touring their shows all over the world, Stan's Café exports art. Art is one of the UK's fastest growing exports - something the government would do well to remember in the upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review. Stan's Cafe is currently looking for a sponsor to provide 120 tonnes of rice - a grain for every person in the world - for its extraordinary show, Of All the People in All the World. The show will play in Birmingham and London next year and is likely to get the kind of massive press coverage for the company providing the rice that no amount of advertising could buy.
It's no surprise that both Fierce and Stan's Café are finalists in this year's Match Made in Heaven?, a Dragon's Den style event organised by Birmingham City Council that takes place at the Custard Factory next week and puts four Birmingham arts organisations head to head in front of a panel of business leaders to win £1,000 and marketing support. Initially when I read the press release I thought it was a sign of the times, a rather ghastly attempt to turn genuine funding needs into entertainment and making companies jump through hoops for a paltry amount of money. But as both Fierce and Stan's Café point out, it's not just the money that's useful, but also the opportunity to have face to face contact with the business people who could be the sponsors of tomorrow. Who knows, maybe Stan's Café will meet the sponsor who can provide all the rice they need. With councils increasingly finding it difficult to offer local arts organisations cash, it's good to see Birmingham doing what it can to bring arts and business together.
In an ideal world there would of course be comprehensive subsidy for the arts, and artists would be as valued as City whiz kids. But that isn't going to happen, particularly with the Olympics looming, and if many companies are going to survive into the next decade, then like Fierce and Stan's Café - a company that earns seven quid for every pound it receives in subsidy - they are going to have to be inventive and recognize that art and business are not incompatible and that commercial sponsorship doesn't have to be a Faustian pact.
