See that big guy over there? Almost Herculean, isn’t he, with his sinewy arms and swelling chest, the kind of man you can easily imagine as a master of war and of women. But look again, closely. There’s doubt in his face, too, as if he were not always sure of what he’s doing or even who he is. I bet you this Hercules could crack. You sure wouldn’t want to fight him, but then you wouldn’t want him on your team, either.

Such are the first and second impressions made, gently but indelibly, by John Douglas Thompson in the title role of Theater for a New Audience’s “Macbeth,” at the Duke on 42nd Street. In Arin Arbus’s assured, insightful interpretation of Shakespeare’s most streamlined tragedy, which opened on Friday night and runs through April 21, Mr. Thompson creates a portrait of someone who, from the beginning, is clearly and irrevocably doomed by his own nature.

Yet this is achieved without the showy intensity that usually emanates like waves of radiation from actors who portray the Thane of Cawdor. In the past few years Mr. Thompson has established himself as an actor who can handily fill outsize classical roles, including Othello, Richard III and Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. There’s no doubt that if he chose, he could play Macbeth as a sustained juggernaut of fissured Olympian grandeur.