Thirty-five years after his death, the first unabridged performance of John Lennon’s nonsense poetry will take place at the Edinburgh festival fringe after a crowdfunding campaign reached its target.

Backed by the musician’s widow, Yoko Ono, who said she might travel to Scotland to see the production later this summer, the new adaptation is the first time In His Own Write – Lennon’s wordplay-obsessed collection of nonsense rhymes and drawings – will have been performed since Lennon read extracts of it on television in 1964.

Baldynoggin Productions has cast three actors for the show, including director Jonathan Glew, who was responsible for getting permission to use In His Own Write from the Lennon estate. The estate, run by Ono, is notoriously careful about granting access to any of the Beatle’s works.

“I basically spent a week writing the best letter of my life,” Glew told the Financial Times. He said he had decided to go to the free fringe – where production companies are not charged for venue rental, provided they offer free admission – “to show that my motives were pure, and that I was not trying to take any kind of financial advantage of the Lennon name”.

Glew said he hoped his production would be faithful to the spirit of Lennon’s playful work, which he says is something like The Goon Show. A play based around the book opened at London’s National Theatre in 1968, starring Victor Spinetti. “It is about the growing up of any of us, the things that helped us to be more aware,” Spinetti said at the time. But the production did not do well and closed after a short run.

This year’s Edinburgh fringe will feature another show about the late Beatles star. Lennon: Through a Glass Onion will be part concert and part biography. The former Beatle had links with Scotland’s capital city, spending summers there visiting his aunt and cousin when he was a boy, and returning in later years on holidays with Ono.