This has been a memorable week for admirers of the work of Harold Pinter. First, on Sunday night, came a revival of his 1965 success The Homecoming in a production directed for Radio 3 by Thea Sharrock, with the great man himself in the role of the odious paterfamilias Max. Then, from Monday, Oxford experienced a homecoming of another sort, with the arrival at the Playhouse of a revival of Pinter's Old Times, which is reviewed today by Jeannine Alton on Page 5. The play was given its very first performance at the same venue in April 1971.

The return of the play will have stirred nostalgic memories for many members of this week's audiences who saw the original production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. These include Jeannine herself, though she cannot remember whether she was in the audience in Oxford or later when it settled into its run at the Aldwych, which was then the RSC's London home. She cherishes an abiding impression of the performance of Vivien Merchant, Pinter's then wife, in the role of the visiting Anna. Jeannine says: "She had a faraway look that was ideally suited to this play and, indeed, to a number of Pinter's in which she appeared. She must surely have been an important artistic muse to him."

Powerful nostalgia will have been felt, too, by Sir Peter Hall, the director of the original production and its current revival by Theatre Royal Bath Productions. He writes in the programme: "Old Times was a wonderful present, dedicated to me, and given by Harold Pinter to celebrate my 40th birthday. After the world premiere with Colin Blakely, Dorothy Tutin and Vivien Merchant, I went on to direct the play on Broadway with Robert Shaw, Mary Ure and Rosemary Harris in the cast. I also directed the German premiere of the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with Maximilian Schell, Erika Pluhar and Anna-Marie Duringer. This new 2007 production is the first time I have returned to the play in more than 35 years and I do so with great pleasure and continuing admiration for the text and the author."

Securing the premiere for Oxford in 1971 was a considerable coup for the Playhouse. When the plan was announced, the theatre's then administrator Elizabeth Sweeting said: "It is a very exciting and important premiere for us, and we are closing the theatre for the previous week so that the RSC can rehearse."

This was the first time that Peter Hall (still six years away from becoming Sir Peter Hall) had worked at the theatre since 1955, when he was the exceptionally young artistic director of its resident company. As my long-time colleague Don Chapman wrote in 1971: "You could forgive him for not recognising the refurbished theatre as the same institution that he knew in one of the least prosperous periods of its history."

In 1971, he was three years on from his stint as founding director of the RSC. Old Times was the fourth Pinter premiere he had staged with the company, in each case with the designer John Bury. The others were The Collection, The Homecoming and the double-bill of Landscape and Silence. None of these had been given a showing at the Oxford Playhouse. In fact, you need to go back as far as Pinter's third play (and first full-length one) The Birthday Party, in 1958, to find one that came to Oxford in its original production. As Don Chapman commented: "This baffled and fascinated Oxford audiences and went on to baffle and infuriate their London counterparts. It is extremely unlikely that Old Times will have anything like as rough a passage. Theatregoers have learned to appreciate - if not always understand - the ambivalence of the dramatist's world."

The forecast proved to be not entirely accurate. A week later, when the first notices appeared, The Oxford Times's arts correspondent of the day, Frank Dibb, was noticeably cool. He wrote: "I must honestly confess to a general unresponsiveness to the sort of hypnotism which Mr Pinter's longer plays, in particular, seem to exercise on many of their audiences . . . I could most fervently have wished that the talents of Miss Tutin and Miss Merchant had been more rewardingly employed. Both their voices deserve to be nourished on better fare than these broken meats of theatrical dialogue."