Imagining what minor characters in great plays get up to offstage was elevated by Tom Stoppard to high art with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his comic drama about two courtiers in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In this festival of new one-act plays inspired by Shakespeare and organised by Newport Playgoers Society, Phil Mansell's Poor Yorick cleverly and wittily presents the jester as not dead but decamped from Hamlet's Elsinore and 'dying every night' as an edgy, observational stand-up comic before such terms have been coined. He's on to a loser but at least he's no longer a disinterred skeleton.

Before that, Gary Dooley's Roman and Julia opens the evening with a descant on Romeo and Juliet, as two star-crossed elderly residents of a nursing home find love before they've forgotten what the word is. It’s another interesting take on Bardom, in this case flawed by too many breaks indicating the passage of time. For a thirty-minute piece, concentration needs to be on the unities. In this one, the unity of time is shredded too much, and the interpolated Shakespearian dialogue doesn’t really work.

But by the interval we've already had some super performances from Chris Bissex as the resident wag and fixer Merv Cousho (geddit?) in Dooley's piece and from Will Smith-Haddon as Yorick and Clare Drewett as his bawdy wench Bess in Mansell's, in which the depiction of Queen Gertrude as a Yiddishe Momme is picked up with relish by kosher Sue Morgan.

There are no laughs in Only Words Remain, by Kevin Myers. The experienced Bissex returns to play an ageing Shakespearian actor with dementia. Snippets of his old roles are all that's left of Harry's draining memory. He’s a towering central figure in need of a stronger context than the carelessness of youth. They do care about him but they have their own lives to live.

Then comes To Sleep Perchance To Die, by Russell Walker, a brilliant evocation of every actor's nightmare - forgetting the play and the words. Walker weaves a many-layered, expressionist fantasy involving a handful of Shakespeare plays and a gallon of stage blood. It's funny, profound, disturbing and ever on the move, with idiosyncratic performances from Luke Bowkett, Martin Phillips and Clare Carreno. A real theatrical experience.

The astute directors in order of the plays listed here are Caroline Drewett-Mansell, Russell Walker, Rose Bissex and Jes Hynes.

All four works are winners in a Playgoers' competition held as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Open Stages initiative. One will be chosen for performance at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, and possibly as part of the Stratford celebrations. I know which one my money's on.

Final performances Saturday at 7.15pm.