Ian is raped (Situational Irony)
Ian is depicted as sexually violent and brutish towards Cate, forcing her to do non-consensual sexual acts. He is reprehensible and sexually violent, which makes it ironic that he himself is raped by the Soldier later in the play. Suddenly, the monstrous Ian becomes a victim of his own crimes, an ironic and disturbing twist.
Cate unloads the gun (Dramatic Irony)
In Scene 3, Cate takes the bullets out of the revolver. Because he is blind, Ian does not see her do this, and he asks for the gun. She refuses to give it to him for awhile, but eventually hands it over. He puts it in his mouth and pulls the trigger, but it is empty, so he thinks that he will not be able to kill himself. The audience knows that there are indeed bullets in the room, that Cate unloaded the gun, but Ian has no idea, because he cannot see.
Ian does not die (Situational Irony)
In Scene 4, right before the end of the play, a stage direction tells us that Ian "dies with relief." Immediately after, however, Cate enters and Ian starts talking to her, an ironic reversal of what we believe has just happened. It is unclear whether the death was definitive, whether his conversation with Cate takes place in some kind of afterlife, whether he has come back to life, or neither. This ambiguity is an ironic and mysterious follow-up to Cate and Ian's argument about the nature of death. Sarah Kane writes death as open-ended and unclear as a way of subverting the two poles of their argument, to show that death is in fact more mysterious than either science or religion can explain.
Cate has escaped (Situational Irony)
Right before the Soldier arrives, Cate goes into the bathroom and draws a bath. Throughout Ian's first interaction with the Soldier, the sound of water running can be heard and it sounds as though Cate is in the next room, but when they finally go and open the door, they find that she has fled. All it took for Cate to escape Ian's grasp was the arrival of the Soldier and a light excuse to use the bathroom.
