If nothing else, the Guildhall School of Music’s opera productions keep me well informed about the progress of the Hundred Years War. After staging Aulis Sallinen’s surreal The King Goes Forth to France in March, the students have now progressed to Donizetti’s 1836 opera about the 1347 Siege of Calais — a piece given its British premiere by an earlier generation of Guildhall students in 1993.

It hasn’t exactly become standard repertoire since then, and one can see why. After two impassioned acts depicting the stoic suffering of the besieged French, Act III is a limp anticlimax in which the beastly English king, Edward III, suddenly goes all touchy-feely and allows the French prisoners to walk free. I hope I don’t seem unduly bloodthirsty if I observe that the opera would be much finer, dramatically and musically, if it ended with the six French martyrs marching proudly to their deaths at Act II’s curtain. Donizetti certainly thought so, because he lopped off Act III when he revived the piece.

So it’s hard to blame Alessandro Talevi for letting his staging get rather larky in Act III. Before that, it’s cracking stuff. Madeleine Boyd’s excellent designs — smeary black stage, grubby brown costumes, primitive pikes and long bows — suggest a primordial struggle between prehistoric tribes. The set also lets the action unfold on three levels, with the French leaders threatened by the English from upstage and their own starving populace from below, the latter emerging from beneath the stage like rabid animals to snarl into the footlights.

Not all Donizetti’s florid vocal challenges are tackled with distinction. But Matthew Sprange’s sturdy Mayor of Calais, Lucinda-Mirikata Deacon’s ardent portrayal of the long-suffering Eleonora, and particularly the spirited Máire Flavin as the firebrand Aurelio, all seize their opportunities. What’s best, however, are the fabulously fervent choruses, hurled out with properly savage abandon under David Angus’s baton. Some wind intonation in the orchestra needs attention; but it’s a show that no Donizetti-fancier will want to miss.

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