The oldies are back at Jaipur's Marigold Hotel and they're looking like goodies, too, thanks to a British dame or two and an Ol Parker script that knows when to leave off the breeziness and let the occasional intimation of mortality hold sway. And in a celluloid landscape plagued by sequelitis, the fact that a collective of British pensioners and their newfound Indian chums have been brought back for more is itself rather bracing compared to the usual spate of avengers, transformers or what not that keep most film franchises going.

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's 2012 predecessor chronicled how it is that so motley an array of UK retirees found themselves living the expat life, a change of pace that has so taken wing that this latest film finds the eager young hotel proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel) nursing expansionist plans of a second hostelry he can add to a burgeoning portfolio. And so it is that he heads to California to make a sales pitch, the peppery Muriel (Maggie Smith) by his side. The geographical displacement in itself allows Dame Maggie to occupy vinegary pride of place, not least when she is asked upon return to India how she found America. Her deadpan reply: "it made death more tempting." (Muriel's instructions while Stateside as to how to brew a proper English cuppa will strike a chord with many a Briton who has experienced what Americans serve as "tea".) 

Much of the film's narrative embraces what the playwright Tony Kushner has called in another context "more life", whether one is referring to the cautious Evelyn (Judi Dench) deciding to make a go of it with the Tennyson-quoting Douglas (Bill Nighy) – "we're not not together," she explains when asked; or the irrepressible Madge (Celia Imrie) sizing up the available male talent, her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey a visual clue to the old gal's appetite. To widen the amorous possibilities still further, new arrivals include Richard Gere of all people as a visiting American – 64 and single! – who gets the hots for Sonny's standoffish mum (Lillete Dubey, pictured above with Gere) and Tamsin Greig as a mysterious lone traveler who .... well, perhaps best not to give the rest of what she is up to away.

What's quietly appealing about the director John Madden's second go-round with this material is that these seniors are allowed not just to have a libido but also to be available for and desirous of work. Evelyn's keen eye, for instance, lands her a job sourcing fabrics, while Muriel takes to administering the hotel with the same take-no-prisoners acumen she brings to the rest of life. The actress is simply wonderful, allowing at one point that she proffers opinions, not advice, and there's a neat reference to the age difference between her and Dench's characters that mirrors the actual disparity in age (all of 19 days) between the two women, both of whom turned 80 late last year. (Dench pictured above)

Sure, one could complain that the onscreen India envisaged here is a tad too ceaselessly colourful and charm-filled for comfort and that these people are inhabiting a fantasy-land of their own devising that doesn't relate, say, to the India one sees filling the National Theatre stage in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. But that's like faulting the film Notting Hill for not being Nil by Mouth: the two come from an entirely different place. And you have to credit all concerned for granting this second – and better – Marigold Hotel an appropriately rueful conclusion that tempers the jollity of the Bollywood-style wedding that has come just before. Or as Smith's Muriel remarks with an unforced sagacity that doesn't need to call attention to itself, "there's no such thing as an ending – just a place where you leave the story."

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 

The big screen is no country for old women. The exception who proves the rule over and over again is of course Judi Dench. Of no actress is it more frequently said that you’d happily listen to her reading out the phone book. Her most recent masterclass in the tiny brushstrokes of screen acting is in Philomena, adapted from Martin Sixsmith’s book about helping an Irish woman to find the son she bore out of wedlock in 1952.

These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultural institution which can be relied upon to throw the right sort of party. For the National Theatre's golden jubilee, therefore, the stops were jolly well pulled out and the invitations damn well accepted from the actors who, striplings at the Old Vic in the Sixties, are now our own Oliviers and Ashcrofts and Scofields. And it was almost all impeccable.

Of course the greatest frissons were reserved for those moments when the veterans came back and did their piece once more with feeling – Judi Dench firing up as Cleopatra, Helen Mirren washing her thighs and despatching her husband in Mourning Becomes Electra, Maggie Smith spirited back into The Beaux’ Stratagem. Above all, Joan Plowright, long widowed and no longer sighted, returned to the stage of the Old Vic to repeat with heavy poignancy the words of St Joan she first spoke 50 years ago: “To shut me from the light of the sky… to make me breathe foul damp darkness”.

You’d get an intriguing idea of the history of musical theatre from the shows on show

And yet even if the actors were available, this wasn’t simply an exercise in carbon-copying the past. Penelope Wilton and Michael Gambon might easily have revisited Betrayal, but instead he paired up with Derek Jacobi to reincarnate Gielgud and Richardson in No Man’s Land (pictured below), and she with Nicholas Le Prévost for a slice of Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce. If the actors weren’t available, rather than do something else the parts were just recast from the company. Thus Arcadia was (rather uncertainly) peopled by new faces led by Rory Kinnear. Ralph Fiennes ferociously deputised for Anthony Hopkins as Lambert Le Roux. Rosalie Craig not Martine McCutcheon sang of the rain in Spain.

You’d get an intriguing idea of the history of musical theatre from the shows on show here: not just Lerner and Loewe and the inexhaustible Guys and Dolls (Nicely Nicely Johnson was shorn by time constraints of his traditional umpteen encores), but also the fleck and spume of Jerry Springer the Opera and the Ipswich sex worker serial killer musical London Road. And Dame Judi, trotting out “Send in the Clowns” one last time, still can’t hold a tune (no please don’t write in).

This was a compilation album with well-choreographed tonal shifts. Different buttons were pushed as James Corden beat himself up as Francis Henshall, Simon Russell Beale revisited his fiercely intelligent Prince of Denmark, and Joey the foal ballooned into a mighty stallion. And as the story of the National’s 50 years unfolded, a subtle hand was at work making connections between apparently random clips. We segued from one African queen to another as Cleopatra made way for a young gay man in Angels in America dying of Aids and missing his cat Sheba. Alan Bennett’s history boys, caught napping by the headmaster when playing at prostitution in a French class, pretended instead to enact a scene from a military hospital at Ypres. Straight after that the trenches were presaged for real in War Horse.  

And for all the in-jokes about critics and actors, rarely did it feel like a self-indulgent orgy of nostalgia. We don’t know what Rufus Norris’s reign will bring, but this highlights package suggested that it’s high time for a revival of Peter Nichols’ The National Health as the NHS endures its latest growing pains, and possibly also for Pravda as the fourth estate endures moral and financial meltdown. It’s also time for Jacobi, a very early member of the National company at the Old Vic, finally to make his full Southbank debut, possibly in some Pinter.

Quibbles and caveats? As a television event it may have all looked quizzical to non-theatregoers. Filmed theatre has come on a treat since the arrival of swooping high-definition cameras, but stage and screen will never be entirely reconciled so long as actors quite properly see it as their first duty to hit the back wall of the upper circle. Two plays about politicians from David Hare felt like too many. Only one female playwright (Alecky Blythe) was simply not enough. And aside from Clive Rowe rocking the boat, it was quite a white night for lead performers until Adrian Lester came on at the death. His Othello neatly completed the circle, the Moor having been Laurence Olivier’s first role for the National, while making the point that the National and indeed the nation has moved on in half a century.

That’s why the line of the night belonged to Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s debut play. “One is having one all the time,” he explained to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Rosencrantz, before clarifying: “A future.” See you at the theatre.

Overleaf: a gallery of images from 50 Years on Stage

In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.

The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who takes up the elderly woman's cause rather than write the weighty tome on Russian history that nags at his loftier journalistic impulses. Nor does it hurt that he has a beady-eyed Fleet Street editor (Michelle Fairley) thirsting for a scoop and to that end funding the pair's travels up to and beyond the point that Philomena, for one, ponders whether the pair ought not to call it quits.

That they persevere is no surprise given the film's origins in Sixsmith's 2009 non-fiction account of an odyssey that led this unlikely duo down many a blind alley and bureaucratic impasse before reaching a conclusion that finds room for anger aplenty amidst the sentiment. Nor will it come as news to hear that the odd couple centre-screen manage along the way to trade various life lessons before arriving at a (minimum) three-hankie denouement whose success in artistic terms owes something to that feeling of barely suppressed rage.It helps to have in Frears an abidingly honest director whose integrity is matched every step of the way by his sweetly wigged and accented leading lady. In lesser hands, this could have been merely the tale of a cute old Irish dear (Philomena more or less announces herself as that at the start) and the pent-up Oxbridge type who starts to soften under her tutelage. But just when the divisions between the two look set to go the standard-issue route, the film commendably widens its focus, stirring Reagan-era politics, the oppressiveness of the Catholic church, and the perennial appeal of the romance novel into an ever-thickening moral brew. You leave the film moist-eyed, to be sure, as well as wise to the hatred attendant upon so many in life. And that Philomena without a trace of sanctimony refuses to let into her heart. 

Coogan might be thought to pretty much be the film, since he not only co-stars but gets producing and co-writing credits, as well. And you can feel the serious actor in this celebrated comic tearing into the film's eleventh-hour broadside against organised religion in a face-off in Philomena's onetime convent that finds the magnificent Barbara Jefford in memorably implacable form. (Those who remember Peter Mullan's 2002 The Magdalene Sisters will discover equivalent terrain here.)

But the movie wouldn't be under Oscar's seasonal radar without the flinty, often funny presence of Dench, who sees out the occasional scripted lapse (an unnecessary confession scene, to start with) to compel interest in this quiet crusader - a kind woman whose will is sorely tested as she reflects upon the flesh-fearing environs from long ago that have eaten away at her since. Peter Hall once said of this actress that she possesses a unique combination of "sex and wit, wit and sex". To those qualities, add an unsparing emotional engagement, whatever the liberties taken with the actual narrative in its passage to the screen.

"Just because you're in first-class," an airborne Philomena admonishes her uppity companion, Martin, "doesn't make you first-class." (Serious product placement here for BA, by the way.) And who better to spout such homilies than that acting rarity: an unassailable class act?  

DAME JUDI DENCH ON THEARTSDESK

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rose Theatre (2010). Judi Dench is a glorious Gloriana in Peter Hall's flat production

Jane Eyre (2011). Dench plays kindly housekeeper to Mr Rochester in invigorating version of the novel with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska

Skyfall (2012). Dench's M (pictured) is written out of the franchise in possibly the best ever Bond movie

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012). The Dames have it in John Madden's tale of British travellers abroad

J. Edgar (2012). Dench as Hoover's mother lacks commitment to her American accent in flawed Eastwood biopic

Peter and Alice, Noël Coward Theatre (2013). Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw step through the looking glass in Michael Grandage's elegiac production of John Logan's new play

Spectre (2015). Dench's M cameos in a video message beyond the grave as Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes carry on without her

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015). The expats are back in that rare sequel that betters its predecessor

The Winter's Tale, Garrick Theatre (2015). Judi Dench brings gravitas to Kenneth Branagh's West End season opener

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses - Richard III (2016). Dench is a matchless veteran opposite Benedict Cumberbatch chills's crook-backed king

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Philomena