On a stage full of musical clutter, there's a man playing a harmonium.

The drones emanating from the instrument are mournful, and as familiar sounding as the school assembly piano that tinkles from the other side of the stage.

Only when a voice comes in does everything click into place. It's a voice that doesn't so much speak as intone in a doleful and deadpan baritone and is instantly recognisable as Ivor Cutler, the Glasgow-born poet, songwriter and performer whose minimalist absurdism captured several generations of left-field humour-loving listeners to BBC radio. This relationship began in the 1950s and 1960s on Monday Night at Home, broadening Cutler's appeal in the 1980s and 1990s via John Peel and Andy Kershaw's shows before Cutler passed away in 2006.

The above scene opened the third day of a week's development at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, for Matthew Lenton's Vanishing Point theatre company's forthcoming show. This co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland has the working title of The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler and will be one of two Vanishing Point projects to appear in 2014. The second, to be produced with partners in Russia and Brazil, will look at old age and caring. Judging by the very early stages of the Ivor Cutler show, these are closely related.

As a four-piece band led by musical director James Fortune, who worked recently on West End hit Posh, stand by actors Sandy Grierson and Elicia Daly sit opposite each other at a small, square table bedecked with microphones and two water-filled glasses. With a flat-capped Grierson doing a pitch-perfect impression of Cutler's voice, they engage in a sad and sweet little dialogue that suggests the pair are saying goodbye for the final time. As their exchange reaches a natural impasse, Grierson and Daly circle their fingers along the rims of the glasses, setting off a set of amplified chimes the band quietly picks up on, not just with harmonium and piano, but violin, musical saw and brushed drums.

These underscore Grierson's funereal rendition of Cutler's song, I'm Going in A Field, a ditty first heard on Cutler's 1967 George Martin produced album, Ludo, recorded after Cutler appeared as Buster Bloodvessel in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film. The song was more recently heard in Paisley Patter, part of Scottish Ballet's 2010 Off Kilter dance compendium.

As Grierson repeats Cutler's erotically inclined mantra with increasing abandon, its sentiments and melody sound not unlike Louis Armstrong's take on Wonderful World.

With Grierson up on his feet and pacing the floor like a pop star, the music rises and swells with equal abandon. The effect is spine-tinglingly elegiac. As a card-carrying member of the Noise Abatement Society, Mr Cutler, as he preferred to be called, would not have approved.

"Now and again we're very intentionally disturbing Ivor Cutler's cosmos," Fortune confesses, "but at the same time respecting his world view by trying to find justification for that. You can get away with it if you have the character of Ivor Cutler come onstage and say, 'I hated that'. I'm also thinking of it like a gig, in that we'll write down a list of songs and think, what would that be like? He's got a lot of love songs."

For Lenton the roots of the project are musical, dating all the way back to Vanishing Point's 2007 show Subway. That show saw company associate Grierson onstage with a seven-piece Balkan band the company came across in a bar while on tour.

"When we were workshopping Subway, we had a violin in the room," Lenton explains, "and would do improvisations where we'd just tell a story and someone would play some music. In all that improv we would always use that song, I'm Going in a Field, which I loved."

Fortune observes that Cutler's distinctive musical style has its roots in klezmer, a musical form that combines the joyous with the melancholy in a way that chimes with Lenton and Grierson's outlook.

"The thing that worried me about it was being too twee or too cosy," says Lenton. "I talked myself around that by imagining if Ivor Cutler was Russian rather than Scottish he'd maybe be thought of more as someone like Gogol or one of those absurd Russians.

Grierson goes further, likening Cutler to Polish-born Jewish American novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer.

"Cutler was Jewish," Grierson says, "so you see his Scottishness, but his Jewishness also comes through in his work, and you see all sorts of similarities."

If such sentiments tally with Vanishing Point's internationalist outlook, the company's second 2014 production looks set to make their approach even more concrete. Following previous partnerships with companies in Italy and Portugal on Interiors and Saturday Night, this new work, with the working title of Growing Old, will be developed with collaborators in Glasgow, Brasilia and Moscow, before premiering at the Brighton Festival. Before this, Interiors looks set to tour to Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima, with other possibilities beyond those dates.

"It's an interesting time to be doing all that," Lenton says, "It's something I've always wanted to do, and instinctively I've always looked outside this country for my influences. But at this time you also get these different perspectives of Scotland from all these different places. With the independence referendum coming up, you get a lot of people in different countries who are interested in Scotland and ideas of Scottishness."

Lenton, who recently decamped from Glasgow to Nairn, talks seriously about relocating Vanishing Point's operations solely to a Highland base, where he would be able to operate in a manner which again resembles European ensembles who step off the artistic production line to operate on their own terms.

"Part of me just wants to do the Pina Bausch thing, buying a barn up here, basing the company here, having a place where artists can stay and having a partnership with Eden Court, where we can maybe present a show a year as well as touring work. It's easy for companies to get too comfortable with a particular aesthetic, and I think that's dangerous. Not just with the work we do, but how we work.

"It's all about being curious, and not seeing boundaries or borders, and wanting to work with people from different places. Vanishing Point have always ploughed our own furrow, and found ways we want to work.

"As an artist, and as a person, you have to keep moving forward, and you have to keep trying things you don't know you can do."

Mr Cutler would surely have approved of that.

Vanishing Point's Ivor Cutler project will premiere in co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland in April 2014. Visit www.vanishing-point.org.