Frank Stubbs (Timothy Spall) is a down-at-heel ticket tout with grand ideas. He has an ambition to become a 'high class' promoter of famous and talented performers. In reality, his ambitions tend to outstrip his capabilities.

Based on J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World. Peggy Ford runs her father's rum bar in Mayaro, a quiet fishing village in Trinidad. Nothing much happens in Mayaro until a handsome young stranger appears and insists that he has just murdered his father.

A British diplomat to a West Indian island nation finds his idyllic existence thrown into chaos when a large American drilling company finds a huge source of natural mineral water there.