Back in May 1958 Harold Pinter's Birthday Party opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and closed within a week, having become what its author has called “the most universally detested play London had known for a very long time”. If just one critic, Harold Hobson, of The Sunday Times, hadn't seen its qualities, Pinter would probably have stopped writing for the theatre.

Though it's hard to imagine so powerful a light simply disappearing beneath a bushel, there might now be no Nobel laureate living in Kensington and there certainly wouldn't be the 50th anniversary revival of The Birthday Party that's about to be staged at, yes, the Lyric, Hammersmith.

The genesis of the play came in 1954, when Pinter was an obscure actor struggling in weekly rep. In Eastbourne, where he was to perform in a dopey farce and had nowhere to stay, he got talking in a pub with a retired concert pianist, who took him to his lodgings and let him share his attic. This odd little man, Pinter observed, kept being tickled and goosed by his landlady and, as he wrote to a friend, “I have filthy insane digs, a great bulging scrag of a woman with breasts rolling at her belly, an obscene household, cats, dogs, tea-strainers, mess, scratch, dung, poison, infantility”.

There in embryo were Stanley, the pianist uneasily cloistered in seaside lodgings, and Meg, his dim, adoring landlady. But more was obviously needed before that seed could grow into The Birthday Party. Hence Pinter's invention of Goldberg and McCann, the sinister pair who come to wreck Stanley's mind and drive him to some amorphous hell.

Their significance has been much debated, but Pinter has said that they emerged from his memories of the Second World War, when, as a Jewish boy in London, he had good reason for fear: “The idea of the knock on the door came from my knowledge of the Gestapo, which was very much on my mind at the time.”

The originality of the one-act Room, which launched Pinter's career in Bristol in 1957, led the producer Michael Codron to take an option on what was becoming the jobbing actor's first full-length play. And the omens were good during The Birthday Party's pre-London tour to Oxford, Cambridge and Wolverhampton, where the local critics responded warmly to its Kafkaesque comedy. Pinter, whose actress wife Vivien Merchant had just had their son, had every reason to hope his family would no longer be “terribly, terribly poor - I was incredibly thin in those days, mainly because there was very little to eat”.

But the London critics disgraced themselves, as their forebears had with Ibsen, writing some of the most arrogantly uncomprehending reviews ever. The Guardian saw only “half-gibberish and lunatic ravings” in the play and The Daily Telegraph an author who “wallows in symbols and revels in obscurity”. A despairing Pinter went to the Thursday matinee, to encounter an usherette who, learning he was the author, said: “You poor chap, the dress circle's closed, but why don't you go in and sit down, darling.” The dramatist still has the receipt for the performance: £2 9s or £2.45.

Yet that matinee changed everything, for in the six-person audience was Hobson, who might have saved the play if he'd seen it earlier and confided his enthusiasm to Codron, yet still published an extraordinarily incisive rave after its closure.

For him, it evoked terror at the door, menace everywhere, and an agonisingly inescapable past - and he called Pinter “the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in London”.

Thanks to that, Pinter went on to write The Caretaker, and, thanks also to an ITV production in 1960 seen by 11 million viewers and acclaimed by the television critics as “a big hit” and “a play to scorch the nerve ends”, The Birthday Party has been revived in the West End, at the National and all over the world. It's an acknowledged masterpiece - meaning what?

Pinter has always given the play more political significance than Hobson, writing to the original director, Peter Wood, that it was about “the hierarchy, the Establishment, the socio-religious monsters who arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility” and, later, declaring that it “took an extremely critical look at authoritarian postures - power used to undermine if not destroy the individual or the questioning voice”.

But he also told Wood that “meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impertinent - and meaningless”. When Alan Ayckbourn, who played Stanley in an early Scarborough revival, asked Pinter to explain the character, his answer was cheerfully succinct: “Mind your own f***ing business”. What finally makes The Birthday Party so fascinating is its dangerous mystery - as the Lyric revival will surely remind us in two weeks' time.

The Birthday Party previews at the Lyric, Hammersmith, W6 (08700 500511), from May 8 and opens on May 12

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