When playwright and film star Sam Shepard appeared on the stage of the Citizens Theatre following the final performance of the Gorbals-based emporium's production of Shepard's 1980 play, True West, it was a fitting close to the theatre's winter season before its Christmas show, The Jungle Book, opens this weekend.

A Hollywood legend with counter-cultural credentials, if ever an artist encapsulates the Citz's own schizophrenic history of classical glamour with an edge, Shepard is it.

"It created a real buzz," says Citizens artistic director Dominic Hill. "It is exactly what the Citz should be about. For us, it is about saying that, yes, we are in Glasgow, and, yes, we are in the Gorbals, but as well as being local, we have also got an international outlook and an aspiration to continue that international outlook the theatre has always had."

Following a season that also saw Chris Hannan adapt Dostoyevsky's novel Crime And Punishment, such attributes are in abundance in the Citz's 2014 spring season, revealed here exclusively as tickets for all shows go on sale today. Nowhere is this more evident than in the revival of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play The Libertine. It is a ribald study of 17th century poet, playwright and hedonistic lad about town John Wilmot, aka the second Earl Of Rochester.

"It is a play I have wanted to do for a long time," Hill says. "I wanted to do something in period to try and capture that wonderful theatrical exuberance that was so much a part of the old Citz.

"With The Libertine, we can have our cake and eat it, because it has all the joy and wit of a Restoration comedy, but without having to filter it through 400 years of shifts of language. The Libertine is a very funny play. It is hugely theatrical and incredibly rude. It is about excess, and a man who was a sort of rock 'n' roll celebrity of his age who is eventually destroyed by that excess."

Prior to The Libertine, Hill will direct Zinnie Harris' version of August Strindberg's dark study of cross-class sexual desire, Miss Julie. Normally regarded as a chamber piece, Hill again puts a play more often seen in studio spaces on to the main stage.

"The play is extraordinary, and Zinnie's text is great," Hill points out. "Zinnie's made it about more than what made the play so shocking when it was first done. So it is not just a story about a posh girl sleeping with a servant. There is much more here about sexual politics between a man and a woman rather than just class."

The Citz 2014 season begins, however, with the first Glasgow sighting of Ciara, David Harrower's study of one woman's uneasy relationship with art and crime. The production won a Herald Angel when Blythe Duff performed it in Edinburgh in August, and this revival by the Traverse and Duff's Datum Point company promises an even greater impact when it arrives in the city in which it is set.

Ciara will be followed later in January by a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night by the experimental Filter company.

February marks the return of Glasgow Girls, David Greig and Cora Bissett's musical play based on the real life story of a group of Drumchapel schoolgirl asylum seekers who took on the establishment and won. Co-produced by the Citizens, the National Theatre Of Scotland and an array of other partners, Glasgow Girls arrives back on home turf following a nomination for Best Musical Production.

"It is a show that has developed a lot since it was first here," Hill points out, "and 2014 seemed like the right time to bring it back to Glasgow."

Multi-culturalism is similarly on the agenda in Refugee Boy, Lemn Sissay's stage version of fellow poet Benjamin Zephaniah's novel about a 14-year-old Ethiopian boy's experiences in London. Refugee Boy will tour to the Citz in a production by West Yorkshire Playhouse.

This will be followed by a revival of Scottish Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth, which Hill first directed for the company in 2005.

The Citz is a major venue for the Glasgow International Comedy Festival during the first week in April, followed by Vanishing Point's tribute to the late poet and story-teller, Ivor Cutler.

As reported in these pages earlier this year, The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler sees Vanishing Point team up with the National Theatre Of Scotland for a loving homage to this unique figure and the absurd world he occupied.

With the Glasgow Commonwealth Games raising the city's profile, the Citz responds with Sports Day.

This large-scale show brings together a compendium of short pieces by major Scottish playwrights responding to the theme of a school sports day. These will then be knitted together to make a new piece of community theatre.

"It is important for us that our non-professional work gets a high profile," Hill says, "and, as with everything else in the season, we want it to be on the main stage."

Beyond 2014, Hill has the Citz's 70th birthday in 2015 to think about and then there is the matter of raising some £14million over the next three years for plans to upgrade the theatre's facilities. A model of the proposed plans sits in Hill's office, symbolising an even brighter future for the Citizens Theatre.

"The spring season is always so much longer than the autumn," Hill points out. "This allows us the opportunity to programme more diverse work.

" In 2014, especially, with the referendum and the Commonwealth Games, Scotland and Glasgow are going to be under the spotlight even more than they normally are. We did not want to ignore that. We want to programme a season of work that encapsulates the spirit of aspiration that exists here, and that makes theatre a real event."

Tickets for the Citizens Theatre's 2014 spring season are on sale now.

www.citz.co.uk