With its surefire laughs and delicious plot complications, “Twelfth Night” is a virtually indestructible comedy. Still, few directors would have the audacity to dismantle it limb by limb, the way Declan Donnellan does in his all-male, all-Russian version, now at BAM. Yet the giddy spontaneity of Mr. Donnellan’s refracted “Twelfth Night” wins you over despite its inconsistencies. Even when its dazzling component parts don’t belong in the same play, their freshness is irresistible.

Mr. Donnellan and his longtime collaborator, the designer Nick Ormerod, are best known as co-artistic directors of Cheek by Jowl, the influential British theater company they co-founded in 1981. Over the past decade, they’ve earned a BAM following with juicy productions of classics like “As You Like It,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” and “Othello.”

Their “Twelfth Night” (2003) — performed by Russian actors, in Russian — depends considerably less on the pleasures of Shakespeare’s language than its predecessors. Its surtitles follow the original text only loosely. (Bizarrely, the titles sometimes appear to have been translated from the Russian back into English — worse for the wear.) But the surtitles here are an aside, not a necessity. In this “Twelfth Night,” you don’t listen to the words — you listen to the voices. And mostly, you watch.

Watching produces a kind of vertiginous thrill. From the first scene, when the cast of 13 floods the stage, forming an impromptu bossa nova band, there’s an agreeable wackiness to the proceedings. Moving across a vast open stage with a minimal backdrop of 10 floor-to-ceiling banners (first black, then white), the actors use space with the verve of dancers. Nothing feels hemmed-in or harnessed; there’s plenty of room to run and to hide.

The same freewheeling quality permeates the acting. The actors create distinct characters, but there’s a noticeable looseness to their interactions. The feeling is that of a live sporting contest: The rules may be fixed, but there’s a lot of room for impulse and chance. The exchanges between characters feel not-quite-rehearsed; you catch quick flashes of surprise on the actors’ faces.

The all-male cast adds an extra layer to an already ripe set of gender complications. The Duke’s great love, the Countess Olivia (Alexey Dadonov), has the matronly air of a drag queen past her prime. From the outside, Olivia’s maidservant Maria (played with deadpan timing by Ilia Ilyin) is plainly a guy in a dress and earrings, yet every move he makes discloses the perfect gentlewoman inside his body. The fresh-faced young Viola (Andrey Kuzichev), “disguised” as a man, is irreducibly a timid boy, and when at last the Duke reluctantly kisses Viola, it’s as a man who knows he’s kissing a boy.

In another director’s hands, the crosscurrents of an all-male “Twelfth Night” might have been considered fodder enough for one “themed” production. But Mr. Donnellan’s energetic mind doesn’t stop at a single-gender, foreign-language version. He explodes the play, section by section — teasing out a theme here, a character there.

His “Twelfth Night” flits briefly over a whole range of tantalizing inspirations — like casting a youthful Sir Andrew Aguecheek (the winning Dmitry Dyuzhev) and dressing him in boxing gear for a slapstick showdown with the disguised Viola. Or seating his nobles like apparatchiks at heavy desks. Or channeling the drunken revels of Sir Toby Belch (Alexander Feklistov) into a chorus of a Russian drinking song bathed in vodka and sentimental tear — and turning the other song and dance bits into winking Latin-lounge numbers.

Most striking of all is Mr. Donnellan’s take on the cruel prank Olivia’s household plays on the vain steward Malvolio (a melancholy Dmitry Scherbina). Malvolio has always been the thorn in the rose garden that is “Twelfth Night” — by the time the otherwise likable quartet of household characters has gleefully humiliated him and jailed him under charges of insanity, the comedy veers perilously close to losing its charm. Malvolio’s quick rehabilitation at the play’s end balances the humors just in the nick, but he still gets a provocative last line: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!”

In an example typical of the wide-ranging freedom Mr. Donnellan allows his actors, Malvolio dominates the end of Act I, croaking a long, desperate monologue. With Malvolio raving in full “Pagliacci” mode, the joke can hardly be on him. Drawn in by this vain, lonely figure, our allegiance briefly shifts each time one of the pranksters pops out from behind the curtains, spouting a comic aside. We want to find the prank funny, yet there is something horrifying about the viciousness of the joke. It’s a relief when, in the play’s final moments, Olivia finally releases Malvolio from his misery.

The heaviness of Malvolio’s performance throws this whirligig of a play offkilter, like a frisbee with a dented edge. At the same time, the palpable excitement of Mr. Donnellan’s “Twelfth Night” comes from the ever-present possibility that its simultaneous experiments won’t cohere. This kind of daring and spontaneity may produce uneven results, but the many high-flying moments of this “Twelfth Night” can make you a fan of heterogeneity.

Until November 12 (BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).