" This wooden O " becomes ‘this wooden T’ in Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production of the Bard’s grand old flag waver Henry V, this summer’s offering of free Shakespeare on Boston Common, its seventh such gift to the city. In director Steven Maler’s ingenious framing device, the play begins in a London tube station during World War II, allowing the production to comment not just on Shakespeare’s patriotic paean to Henry’s Providentially attributed 1415 victory at Agincourt but also on Laurence Olivier’s famously rallying 1944 film of the play. Against the bombed-out tile walls of the subway station, to which Londoners have fled to escape the pummeling of the Luftwaffe, a woman in period coat and hat, in the role of Shakespeare’s Chorus, bucks up a frightened young boy in pajamas with the tale of Henry V’s miraculous stand. As the scene expands to accommodate " The vasty fields of France, " an unassuming uniformed man sheds his coat to become the young king poised for his imperialist adventure.

Too unassuming, perhaps. Broadway and film actor Anthony Rapp, whom CSC plugs in to play " This star of England, " renders the verse with admirable clarity but lacks wattage. The production that surrounds him (which I saw in only its second preview) has definite strengths, including the balletic battle choreography by Robert Walsh (who also plays a brooding, authoritative Essex) and, in Jeremiah A. Kissel, a Pistol who’s a pistol. Moreover, Maler’s inclination to push actors he admires to unlikely achievements bears fruit down the ranks, with popular zany John Kuntz almost unrecognizable as fanatical Welshman, military disciplinarian, and war historian Captain Fluellen.

But Rapp, a star of the original cast of Rent who also played the title character in the Tony-nominated 1999 revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, is a one-note Henry. Two, actually, if you count the charmingly Charlie Brown–ish wooer of Shakespeare’s act five. Rapp’s monarch lacks the stature and charisma the carousing Falstaff pal of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, is supposed to have donned with the crown (comparisons to George W. Bush work better on paper than in the actual performance of the play). It’s hard to believe this Henry’s strength of personality would push soldiers " unto the breach " or rouse them to a battle in which they’re outnumbered five to one. Although the actor interprets his speeches intelligently and renders them humanly, Rapp (who has little experience with the Bard) portrays the king, almost from start to finish, in a squinty-eyed, head-waggling pique. Even the reflective fourth-act consideration of the burdens and dubious benefits of " idol ceremony " seems more pissed-off than profound. The blond, boyish Rapp rises better to the challenge of perhaps the greatest rallying speech in the canon, the glamorizing invitation to join the " happy few " leaking blood while sharing honor on St. Crispin’s Day.

Maler had originally planned to stage Macbeth this summer; he chose the patriotic Henry V, which chronicles the title character’s 15th-century victory over an effete and insulting France while portraying ethnic divisions within the British forces, in the wake of September 11. " War, " the director asserts in a program note, " reveals the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. " From interviews, we glean that Maler wants to play down Henry’s heroic gleam, giving equal weight to what seem (at least to us) the character’s more troubling reactions to the pressures of war, including barbarous threats at the siege of Harfleur and panicky orders to kill French prisoners. Additionally, in this production, the king’s one-time fellow Falstaff satellite, enflamed-faced Bardolph, is dragged on stage, whining and begging, and hanged in full view of monarch and audience for his theft of a pax from a French church, without Henry’s so much as flinching. But Rapp lacks sufficient depth to create the complex portrait Maler intends. His ordinary-guy Henry, though likable and self-effacing when trying to sell himself to the French princess he has in effect already bought, is best in his quiet, prayerful moments, and there aren’t enough of them.

The production, though, works admirably, its three hours fleeting by on a beautiful evening, its grim World War II subway tableau and snippets of 1940s radio broadcast serving as an unlikely but affecting backdrop to a seemingly dark day at Agincourt. Moreover, the presence, on the sidelines or wandering through the action, of a small boy in pajamas (a representative of the terrors of war on the home front) serves to presage the pivotal murder of the English boys guarding the luggage — an act that hardens the king.

Too often productions of Shakespeare’s histories give way toward the end to amateur swordplay among a small cadre insufficient to trigger the " imaginary puissance " the Bard’s Chorus directs us to make. But fight director Walsh’s stylized battles, fought with staffs (the long-haired frat-boy French twirling theirs almost as if they were batons), are eerily stately. Also effective is the way in which the fight scenes fall away, usually revealing the unhelmeted king in the midst of things. And there is a gratifying battlefield encounter, not specified in the script, between Rapp’s Henry and Jonno Roberts’s smug rock-star Dauphin, whose taunting gift of tennis balls, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s convoluted interpretation of Salic law, got the war game rolling in act one.

This Henry V does not emphasize the ethnic divisiveness among the king’s army, though since its Pistol and its Fluellen are among its strongest presences, the characters’ tiff over Fluellen’s Welsh-ceremonial leek is a high point. Kissel’s Pistol, a scabrous, fast-talking ne’er-do-well who also exudes an aura of despair, especially at the hanging of Bartolph, makes the most of his role as Falstaff’s con-man and war-leech heir. The scene in which he exasperatedly tries to get his filching hand across the language barrier and into the pocket of a French prisoner is funnier than the comic bits in Henry V often are. He meets his match, though, in Kuntz’s gruff Fluellen, whose enthusiasm for all things Welsh, including the king, is so intense that at one point he picks the monarch up in a bear hug.

The usually comical Kuntz is amusing here, but in a manner as different from his usual antics as, well, Henry V is from Starfuckers or Actorz . . . with a Z (to name but two of Kuntz’s one-man collections of eccentric vignettes). The line-toeing Captain Fluellen is a bit of a caricature, but a fierce one, as devoted to martial discipline and martial history as he is to king and country. ( " Though it appears a little out of fashion,/There is much care and valor in this Welshman, " Henry says.) And Kuntz, employing an unrecognizable bark, a stiff-even-when-at-ease stance, the fighting habits of a she-bear, and just a tad of hysteria, brings out the character’s comic aspect, popping up at one point, atop a sandbag in the trenches, with a cup of tea. But he can be threatening, too, and never more so than when he makes Pistol, who has ridiculed his leek (a symbol worn by the Welsh on Saint Davy’s Day) eat said onion, whacking him not with " an English cudgel " but with his bare fists. Probably not even Kuntz’s most ardent fans would have pegged him as an action hero.

Apart from Henry V himself, it is Shakespeare’s Chorus that has the most-famous of the play’s lines of poetry, from the opening " O for a Muse of fire " to the fourth-act-ushering paean to the king’s " largesse universal like the sun " that leads to a widespread " little touch of Harry in the night. " In Maler’s conceit, the familiar conjurations of scene fall to Marya Lowry’s maternally comforting yet purringly eloquent green-coated and red-pumped madonna of the air raid, who tells a heroic tale to a mesmerized child as the bombs and the sirens make a racket. Lowry’s take is soothing, yet seductive. And the device of keeping the home front burning, as Shakespeare tells his tale of war abroad, seems particularly to suit this public-spirited yet apprehensive time.