David Hare, whose adaptations of the classics Kent has staged a number of times, admires his "sense of responsibility to the writer, the dead author". Both he and Tom Hollander suggest that what marks out Kent from other directors is his willingness to serve actors and text - he is not, in Hollander's words, "a dogmatic auteur who recreates a play in his own image". Tom Hollander, who starred in Kent's production of Tartuffe and is currently rehearsing with him for a new staging of Gogol's The Government Inspector, regards him as "the only director I've worked with who truly understands what actors' preoccupations are when rehearsing a part". Richard Griffiths, who was transformed into a major classical actor when Kent directed him in Brecht's Life of Galileo, ranks him second only to Trevor Nunn among living directors, and talks of his "gift of understanding an individual actor's personal frame of reference ... We downgrade the craft of acting, and upgrade the pursuit of celebrity."This love of actors endears him to them. More important, though, he believes that "the Almeida puts actors centre-stage" - which is, he reckons, rarer than you might think. One theme which keeps emerging in conversation with him is his admiration for the sheer nerve it takes to get up on stage - directing he regards as "a much less valorous pursuit".

He gets quite cross, in his gentle way, with what he sees as the underrating of actors - "This whole patronage of actors, that they're these silly fluffy things that ponce around and get paid too much, or have views that are inappropriate ... One is the space itself (the Almeida is tiny, but just big enough to create "some sort of distance, which I think theatre needs"). Middle England got a bit hot under the collar with Brosnan's appointment, but not as inchoately disturbed as it was by a Bond from the Principality with flat vowels and wild mood swings. No wonder they took away his licence to kill.But let's not forget Roger Moore, to whom I think we've all been unfair He was dashing once. You can't blame him that Connery threw in the towel in the early 1970s, when it was harder to pretend that Bond was still living in the 1950s of the trim black two-piece suit.

Moore took on the task of bringing 007 into the regrettably tasteless present. It was just bad luck that his tenure coincided with the glory years of the short-sleeved safari jacket. The moral of Moore's stint is that Bond is resistant to modernisation. His best shot for the future is to retreat to the decade that spawned him, to take his palaeolithic values, his unprotected sex and ye olde exploding fountain pen, back where they came from and not try to bust into the 21st century. For Bond, tomorrow never dies because tomorrow hasn't even been born. JRIt Always seemed to me that Bond, or 007 (he hardly deserved a name), was the comforter to those outcasts and discards from the 1939- 45 shebang He looked modern, to be sure, but he was a throwback. His arrogance was designed to appease those jittery survivors and would-be heroes who struggled to ignore the steady, climatic ineptitude of Britain's real war, trying to pretend that their uniformed careers had been bigger or braver than was the case, and longing to edge in on the hallowed emotional territory of "the few".