These words have either a direct reference to the theatre or are used to describe persons and things that exhibit qualities associated with the theatre. Theatrical is used to describe anything connected with the world of the theatre: a theatrical festival; a theatrical booking agency. It also connotes artificiality and show: His long hair and old-fashioned attire gave him a vaguely theatrical air that was sometimes interesting but more often just eccentric. Since it pertains especially to actors or their performing techniques, histrionic has the most limited application: Her histrionic abilities are more at home before the camera than on the stage. The word, by extension, is used to suggest the showy or affectedly emotional qualities one thinks of in connection with actors and acting: His histrionic display at the funeral was in thoroughly bad taste. Flamboyant originally meant extravagantly ornate or elaborately styled: a house with flamboyant architectural detail; an essay complicated by flamboyant prose. In a generalization of meaning, the word came to imply brilliance or boldness and finally to suggest the same kind affectation and showiness that histrionic does: the flamboyant foliage of autumn; a flamboyant style of dress; a flamboyant display of temper.

In its implication of an affected or showy manner, dramatic is like histrionic and flamboyant : She set all tongues wagging with her dramatic entrance at the party. More than the other words, it has direct pertinence to the drama and to things that are suitable to or characterize acting: a dramatic performance of the highest calibre; The short story was dramatic without being in the least sentimental.

Camp and campy were once restricted in use as homosexual argot to describe the supposedly tell-tale mannerisms of this in-group; the word suggested behaviour that was theatrical , artificial, exaggerated, effeminate or ostentatious. Recently these terms have become fad words that need not refer to homosexuality at all, but can be applied to any manifestation of popular culture that is so incredibly artificial, banal or vulgar as to merit amazement or admiration: campy Joan Crawford films from the 1930s; a camp feather boa that she evidently thought was the last word in chic. These words can now describe, also, deliberate attempts to reproduce such meretricious qualities in serious art or literature. In fact, the words are in danger of being used so vaguely and broadly as to vitiate their usefulness.