Ask almost any Shakespeare enthusiast about “Cymbeline,” and you will invariably get the same litany: It’s a difficult play, over the top, convoluted. In short, the cliché of choice for The Bard’s late romance seems to be “problematic.” But Declan Donnellan, co-artistic director of the internationally renowned British company Cheek by Jowl, which just began performances of the work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, had one objection to the description: “It’s not a cliché!”

“I think it’s the most difficult play I’ve ever directed,” Mr. Donnellan said. Even over the phone from England, Mr. Donnellan’s unmistakable good cheer had a bit of an edge to it. But if Mr. Donnellan was a little stressed out at any point during rehearsals, he can certainly stop worrying now. Cheek by Jowl’s “Cymbeline” has already received glowing notices in Europe, where it made a number of stops before arriving at BAM for two weeks of performances. By all accounts, New York theatergoers are in for a treat.

In 1981, Mr. Donnellan cofounded Cheek by Jowl — the name comes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — with his longtime partner and set designer, Nick Omerod, who has designed almost all of their productions (including the current “Cymbeline”). Through the years, the award-winning company has gained a sterling reputation, as it performed in more than 301 cities in 40 countries spanning six continents. The repertory is made up of both classics and contemporary work, but its bread and butter has always been Shakespeare. Thanks to BAM, New Yorkers have been lucky enough to see a number of Cheek by Jowl productions, including the highly praised all-male “As You Like It” (1994), a superbly creepy “Duchess of Malfi” (1995), and, more recently, a powerful “Othello” (2004). All productions have exhibited the company’s bynow standard traits: an emphasis on clarity of meaning and emotional truth through direct, ungimmicky attention to both text and the actors’ physical expressiveness and movement.

It was precisely this clarity of meaning and emotional truth that was so difficult to mine from the complicated text of “Cymbeline.” The play concerns King Cymbeline and his daughter Imogen who, against her father’s wishes, has secretly married Posthumus and run away, rather than marry her father’s choice, the foolish Cloten. But overlaid on this framework are several sets of disguised identities, a headless corpse (itself mistaken by Imogen), battles, poisonings, even the appearance of the god Jupiter.

Mr. Donnellan had already staged Shakespeare’s three other late romances — “Pericles,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest” — and wanted to complete the set, given that he sees all four plays as cohesive group. “The late romances are like the tragedies — except they have a happy ending,” the director explained. “In his old age — well, he was only about 48 — Shakespeare was getting a bit anarchic and trying to find new ways of writing about death and searching for a spiritual meaning in suffering.” For Mr. Donnellan, the problematic anarchy of “Cymbeline” was a seductive challenge. “It has all the usual things,” he said, “but about four times as many and in rapid succession. But the tone is what is extraordinary. Sometimes tragic, sometimes very, very funny. Sometimes romantic, sometimes realistic. It’s all sorts of things one after another. It’s very modern.”

And all very compelling, no doubt. But it is the director’s and actors’ jobs to discern a thematic thread that ties all the chaos together. To this end, Mr. Donnellan took what many call the play’s great weakness — its unending series of unlikely coincidences — and turned it into a reflection of the aging Shakespeare’s spiritual yearnings — what the director has called “God through the synchronicity of events.” Although people may scoff at Cymbeline’s many coincidences, Mr. Donnellan is convinced that “when [it] happens in our own lives, we don’t tend to laugh. It’s slightly reassuring and terribly frightening all at the same time.”

Of course Shakespeare’s final scene painstakingly sorts out all the mistaken identities in a way that is often played for comedy, given the scene’s considerable strain on credulity. But Mr. Donnellan sees such tactics as facile and untruthful and, instead, plays the scene at face value with absolute sincerity. It’s an approach that some have called “radical,” but it underlines the themes of redemption and forgiveness at the heart of the play. As Mr. Donnellan put it, “Part of love is having to continually recognize and re-recognize the person that you love” (a notion beautifully underscored by the director’s idea to have the same actor double as Posthumus and Cloten).

Mr. Donnellan’s next project will be Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” scheduled for London’s Barbican Centre for Spring 2008 (touring plans are as yet uncertain). The director sees the play as posing a different kind of challenge from the straight-forward approach to “Cymbeline.”

“There, Shakespeare actually is laughing and sending up the whole notion of the Trojan War … a sort of cartoon insult on war in general,” the director said, with this final observation: “Sometimes, mockery is intended by Shakespeare.”