By Don Aucoin for The Boston Globe, 27 June 2015

By the time of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,’’ Prince Harry, the dissolute charmer of the “Henry IV’’ plays, has become King Henry, an untested ruler shouldering a weighty role but still trying to find his way.

Something of the same seems to be true of Ryan Winkles, who plays the young monarch in Shakespeare & Company’s bare-bones production of “Henry V,’’ directed by Jenna Ware.

Winkles does not yet have a firm fix on this admittedly contradictory character, who can be visionary and vindictive by turns. The actor conveys little sense of Henry’s inner fire or psychological complexity. His tentative performance seldom registers with the necessary charismatic force, not even in Henry’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech before the Battle of Agincourt (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .’’)

The upshot is that Winkles’s Henry seems nearly as callow at the end of the play as he does at the beginning, when the Dauphin of France feels free to mock him by sending him a bunch of tennis balls as a reminder of the monarch’s wayward youth, spent carousing with Falstaff. (Sir John, lamentably, does not appear in “Henry V,’’ though Shakespeare does evoke his presence with a description of his death by friends).

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