The story takes place round London underworld and its connections to power. In the action, three social classes are taking part: the Business capital which construct invalid people and sucks the Christian values of compassion and charity, the Marginal capital, herald of the syndicates of crime and the extension of the organized prostitution, and the law and order of the state police, which bears to collaborate with the syndicates for reasons of interest. Brecht borrows the mechanisms from the capitalistic economy and the ''morals'' from the underworld with which he forms the postwar society of Germany. Corruption, blackmail and hypocrisy are the threads with which he weaves his myth aiming at the pitiless sarcasm of the bourgeois manners. As in many of his plays, here also, he denounces the social structure, which he considers as responsible for the demoralization of the people, believing that only if the unfair social structure changes, the people will also change for the better.